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"The cloud will keep getting more reliable, more functional, and cheaper at a rate that you can't begin to match with your limited resources, generalist gear, b

"The cloud will keep getting more reliable, more functional, and cheaper at a rate that you can't begin to match with your limited resources, generalist gear, bloated software stacks, slow supply chains, and outdated innovation paradigms." If the cloud is so great, how come it's so much cheaper to rent a dedicated server at scale?

nubela 12y ago
Exactly. And one thing about cloud compute is that it is cheap for a subset of use-cases. Try going cloud on a high-bandwidth / low-cpu use-case.
cherioo 12y ago
On a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is on-premise server and 10 is 'the cloud', I think renting dedicated server can be a 7, which is pretty 'cloudy'.
lazyant 12y ago
that's comparing an orange with the produce section of a supermarket; AWS is much more than virtual machines; for just a box with a set cpu, memory, disk and bandwidth you're right that it's cheaper to rent a dedicated server and even cheaper to co-locate. Plus even for a single server with a cloud provider you still get advantages like one-click snapshot, monitoring dashboard etc etc. For production/serious servers looking at price alone is not the best idea; what about other features like reliability (uptime), support etc.
untog 12y ago
Because it's a lot more difficult to scale. EC2 allows you to spin instances up and down, balance load between then and cluster databases, etc. etc. If you know all you need is one server, dedicated is great. If you need flexibility, less so.
- mooreds 12y ago
  EC2 doesn't just allow you to scale, it allows you to think of servers as disposable units, the same way people think of processes on bare iron. I'm late to the AWS party, myself, but have been working on a project recently that leverages some of this. It is an eye opener--when you have virtual servers that are controllable by API, you really open up new frontiers of designing applications.
- latch 12y ago
  Nothing you mentioned, spinning instances up and down, balancing between them, clustering databases, is exclusive to EC2, AWS or "cloud" computing in general. Scalability is largely a design exercise, not, as much as AWS sales engineers want your CTO/CFO to believe, an infrastructure exercise. At the point where infrastructure becomes an issue, you're building your own AWS. I'm happy to admit that AWS might make some of this easier, but it's almost certainly going to be more expensive [1], and it's often at the cost of flexibility (lock-in, AWS-specific knowledge). How are dedicated servers, or even collocated servers, possibly less flexible? [1] There are exceptions, S3 and Route53 stand out as, at the very least, being cost-competitive to a greater extent than other AWS/Cloud offerings.
  - nickbauman 12y ago
    Cloud computing was supposed to be synonymous with the concept of utility computing. Where you can plug into any provider with your app and it just works and you pay a markup on the kilowatt hour so to speak. Until there's a uniform cloud platform, we're not there yet. I suspect we're at least a generation away.
  - jmccree 12y ago
    I'm unaware of any dedicated provider that will let me take a $20/mo small instance and scale it within minutes to an insanely beef 8 core instance for a day for about $20 and then back down, with less than 15 mins total downtime. Total cost for a month less than $50. One of the things I feel AWS has succeeded at is putting control of infrastructure in the technology team's hands. In many places dedi or colo requires contract negotiation with the provider and involves some sort of purchasing dept. There are some places I've worked with where getting a dedi/colo could be weeks or months of different teams paperwork. With AWS the tech team can spin up 100 servers with no outside involvement needed after the initial work of getting an aws account with $x-xxx k/mo limit. It's hard to beat the operational flexibility AWS provides, but I can see a few scenarios where creating your own mini private cloud out of dedi/colo servers could be more cost effective.
    - amazon_not 12y ago

nubela 12y ago

Exactly. And one thing about cloud compute is that it is cheap for a subset of use-cases. Try going cloud on a high-bandwidth / low-cpu use-case.

cherioo 12y ago

On a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is on-premise server and 10 is 'the cloud', I think renting dedicated server can be a 7, which is pretty 'cloudy'.

lazyant 12y ago

that's comparing an orange with the produce section of a supermarket; AWS is much more than virtual machines; for just a box with a set cpu, memory, disk and bandwidth you're right that it's cheaper to rent a dedicated server and even cheaper to co-locate. Plus even for a single server with a cloud provider you still get advantages like one-click snapshot, monitoring dashboard etc etc. For production/serious servers looking at price alone is not the best idea; what about other features like reliability (uptime), support etc.

untog 12y ago

Because it's a lot more difficult to scale. EC2 allows you to spin instances up and down, balance load between then and cluster databases, etc. etc. If you know all you need is one server, dedicated is great. If you need flexibility, less so.

mooreds 12y ago
EC2 doesn't just allow you to scale, it allows you to think of servers as disposable units, the same way people think of processes on bare iron. I'm late to the AWS party, myself, but have been working on a project recently that leverages some of this. It is an eye opener--when you have virtual servers that are controllable by API, you really open up new frontiers of designing applications.
latch 12y ago
Nothing you mentioned, spinning instances up and down, balancing between them, clustering databases, is exclusive to EC2, AWS or "cloud" computing in general. Scalability is largely a design exercise, not, as much as AWS sales engineers want your CTO/CFO to believe, an infrastructure exercise. At the point where infrastructure becomes an issue, you're building your own AWS. I'm happy to admit that AWS might make some of this easier, but it's almost certainly going to be more expensive [1], and it's often at the cost of flexibility (lock-in, AWS-specific knowledge). How are dedicated servers, or even collocated servers, possibly less flexible? [1] There are exceptions, S3 and Route53 stand out as, at the very least, being cost-competitive to a greater extent than other AWS/Cloud offerings.
- nickbauman 12y ago
  Cloud computing was supposed to be synonymous with the concept of utility computing. Where you can plug into any provider with your app and it just works and you pay a markup on the kilowatt hour so to speak. Until there's a uniform cloud platform, we're not there yet. I suspect we're at least a generation away.
- jmccree 12y ago
  I'm unaware of any dedicated provider that will let me take a $20/mo small instance and scale it within minutes to an insanely beef 8 core instance for a day for about $20 and then back down, with less than 15 mins total downtime. Total cost for a month less than $50. One of the things I feel AWS has succeeded at is putting control of infrastructure in the technology team's hands. In many places dedi or colo requires contract negotiation with the provider and involves some sort of purchasing dept. There are some places I've worked with where getting a dedi/colo could be weeks or months of different teams paperwork. With AWS the tech team can spin up 100 servers with no outside involvement needed after the initial work of getting an aws account with $x-xxx k/mo limit. It's hard to beat the operational flexibility AWS provides, but I can see a few scenarios where creating your own mini private cloud out of dedi/colo servers could be more cost effective.
  - amazon_not 12y ago