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- Hacker News
- I have a VPS. It costs me £1.34 per month. It's way over-powered for what I need it for.
However, one situation where I think the cloud might be useful is for archive storage. I did a comparison between AWS Glacier Deep Storage and local many-hard-drive boxes, for storing PB-scale backups, and AWS just squeaked in as slightly cheaper, but only because you only pay for the amount you use, whereas if you buy a box then you have to pay for the unused space. And it's off-site, which is a resilience advantage. And the defrosting/downloading charge was acceptable at effectively 2.5 months worth of storage. However, at smaller scales you would probably win with a small NAS, and at larger scales you'd be able to set up a tape library and fairly comprehensively beat AWS for price.
by mnw21cam - Its a weird service because before that point AWS is crazy expensive for storage, especially down in the TB range its awful value compared to your box and drives. But once you get into that PB scale AWS actually seems to be competitive, I guess because the GB/TBs they are selling are from PB scale solutions and all the overhead that entails.by PaulKeeble
- Yeah, but in 800 months you'd come out ahead with a dedicated server in your closet.by ch4s3
- The first couple of paragraphs of price comparisons are useful. Then there are many paragraphs of sheer waffle. The author doesn't even seem able to define what "the cloud" is:
> The whole debate of “is this still the cloud or not” is nonsense to me. You’re just getting lost in naming conventions. VPS, bare metal, on-prem, colo, who cares what you call it. You need to put your servers somewhere. Sure, have a computer running in your mom’s basement if that makes you feel like you’re exiting the cloud more, I’ll have mine in a datacenter and both will be happy.
by stevage - The cheap hosting service they switched to is arguably "cloud".
If you can't drive to the location where your stuff is running, and then enter the building blindfolded, yet put your hands on the correct machine, then it's cloud.
by kazinator - I read the whole thing and I didn't see any waffle. Sure, undeniably some excess word count, some emotion in responding to critics. But no waffle.
The "is this cloud or not" debate in the piece makes perfect sense. Who cares whether Hetzner is defined as "the cloud" or not? The point is, he left AWS without going to Azure or some other obvious cloud vendor. He took a step towards more hands on management. And he saved a ton of money.
- Basically it boils down to:
Is your time worth more than what the fully managed services on AWS cost? And I mean that quite literally in the sense of your billable hours.
If you like spending time tinkering with manually configuring linux servers, and don't have anything else that generates better value for you to do - by all means go for it.
For small pet projects with no customers, a cheap Hetzner box is probably fine. For serious projects with customers that expect you to be able to get back on your feet quickly when shit hits the fan, or teams of developers that lose hours of productivity when a sandbox environment goes down, maybe not so much.
Is AWS more expensive than the salary of the infra guy you would need to hire to do all this stuff by hand? Probably not.
- Well, this sounds wildly out of touch. Companies using Hetzner cloud or servers having thousands of customers and paying 50-100 people are running just fine, but you labeled them a "small pet project". Provisioning new servers works just fine via API when you need it.
Source: I worked at such a company.
by zelphirkalt - This isn’t a binary issue. I disagree with these “abandon the cloud” takes but do agree that most folks spend way way more than they should.
The biggest threat to cloud vendors is that everyone wakes up tomorrow and cost optimizes the crap out of their infrastructure. I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to say that global cloud spending could drop by 50% in 3 months if everyone just did a good audit and cleaned up their deployments.
by JCM9 - Exactly this.
We have to use cloud because we're at the low end of 10^5 servers. Once you hit the high end of 10^3 this is really where you need to be.
Everything we're doing is highly inefficient because of decades of fast and loose development by immature software engineers...and having components in the stack that did the same.
If I had 5 years to rewrite and redesign the product to reflect today's computing reality, I could eliminate 90%+ of the cost. But I'll never get that kind of time. Not with 1000 more engineers and 1000 more years and the most willing customers.
You might get lucky enough that you and a bunch of your customers are so fed up with your company that you get to create the competition.
by busterarm - > The biggest threat to cloud vendors is that everyone wakes up tomorrow and cost optimizes the crap out of their infrastructure
Well there's no danger of that. Even with AWS telling you exactly how to save money (they have a thousand different dashboards showing you where you can save, and even support will tell you), it'll still take you months to work through all the cost optimization changes. Since it's annoying and complicated to do, most people won't do it.
Their billing really is ridiculous. We have a TAM and use a reseller, and it's virtually impossible for us to see what we actually spend each month, what with the reseller discounts, enterprise PPA, savings plans, RIs, and multiple accounts. Their support reps even built us some kinda custom BI tool just to look at costs, and it's still not right.
by 0xbadcafebee - Its not actually that hard to get your own server racked up in a data centre, I have done it. Since it was only one box that I built and installed at home I just shipped it and they racked it in the shared area and plugged the power and network in and gave me the IP address. It was cheaper than renting from someone like hetzner, was about £15 a month at the time for 1A and 5TB a month of traffic at 1gbps. Also had a one off install fee of £75.
At the time I did this no one had good gaming CPUs in the cloud, they are still a bit rare really especially in VPS offerings and I was hosting a gaming community and server. So I made a pair of machines in a 1U with dual machines in there and had a public and private server with raid 1 drives on both and redundant power. Ran that for a gaming server for many years until it was obsolete. It wasn't difficult and I think the machine was about £1200 in all, which for 2 computers running game servers wasn't too terrible.
I didn't do this because it was necessarily cheaper, I did it because I couldn't find a cloud server to rent with a high clockspeed CPU in it. I tested numerous cloud providers, sent emails asking for specs and after months of chasing it down I didn't feel like I had much choice. Turned out to be quite easy and over the years it saved a fortune.
by PaulKeeble - the problem isn't setup. its maintaining it. Its not an easy job to do that some times. Im not trying to dissuade people from running there own servers, but its something to consider.by trinsic2
- What is the mechanism for such services if you want to replace a component (ex. a failing hard drive or upgrade ram)?
- We did this a lot in the early 2000's. At the time I worked for a company with offices in Bellevue and we put our own hardware in full sized racks at a datacenter in the komo4 building in Seattle.
Because of proximity it was easy to run over and service the systems physically if needed, and we also used modem based KVM systems if we really needed to reboot a locked up system quickly (not sure that ever actually happened!).
I'm sure customer owner hardware place in a datacenter rack is still a major business
by nucleative - While I love a good cloud bashing, it's really not black and white. If you're really small, it probably doesn't matter much if you're using Hetzner or AWS, but co-location might be a bit to expensive. If you run an absolutely massive company, cloud vs. self-hosted comes down to whether or not you can build tooling as good as AWS, GCP or Azure, with all the billing infrastructure and reporting.
The issues are mostly in the SME segment and where it really depends on what your business is. Do you need completely separate system for each customer? In that case, AWS is going to be easier and probably cheaper. Are you running a constant low 24/7? Then you should consider buying your own servers.
It's really hard to apply a blanket conclusion to all industries, in regards to cloud cost and whether or not it's worth it. My criticism in regards to opting for cloud is that people want all the benefits of the cloud, but not use any of the features, because that would lock them into e.g. AWS. If you're using AWS as a virtual machine platform only, there's always going to be cheaper (and maybe better) options.
by mrweasel - If you have high volume traffic depending on time of month, ie finance around ultimo/primo, you might need to scale your performance to 5-10x your normal idle load.
If running on your own data center, or renting physical/virtual machines from ie Hetzner, you will pay for that capability overhead for 30.5 days per month, when in reality you only need it for 2-3 days.
With the cloud you can simply scale dynamically, and while you end up paying more for the capacity, you only pay when you use it, meaning you save money for most of the month.
by 8fingerlouie - I'd be more interested to understand (from folk who were there) what the conditions were that made AWS et al such a runaway hit. What did folks gain, and have those conditions meaningfully changed in some way that makes it less of a slam dunk?
My recollection from working at a tech company in the early 2010s is that renting rack space and building servers was expensive and time consuming, estimating what the right hardware configuration would be for your business was tricky, and scaling different services independently was impossible. also having multi regional redundancy was rare (remember when squarespace was manually carrying buckets of petrol for generators up many flights of stairs to keeps servers online post sandy?[1]).
AWS fixed much of that. But maybe things have changed in ways that meaningfully changes the calculus?
[1] https://www.squarespace.com/press-coverage/2012-11-1-after-s...
by tqi - The problem it really solved was your sysadmins were still operating by SSHing into the physical servers and running commands meticulously typed out in a releaae doc or stored on a local mediawiki instance, and acquiring new compute resources involved a battle with finance for the capex which would delay pretty much any project for weeks, while cloud vendors let engineers at many companies sidestep both processes.
Everything else was just reference material for how to sell it to your management.
by Macha - Et al is for people, Et cetera is for things.
Edit: although actually many people on here are American so I guess for you aws is legally a person...
by fennecbutt - One factor was huge amounts of free credits for the first year or more for any startup that appeared above-board and bothered to ask properly.
Second, egress data being very expensive with ingress being free has contributed to making them sticky gravity holes.
by baobun - > But maybe things have changed in ways that meaningfully changes the calculus?
I'd argue that Docker has done that in a LOT of ways. The huge draw to AWS, from what I recall with my own experiences, was that it was cheaper than on-prem VMware licenses and hardware. So instead of virtualizing on proprietary hypervisors, firms outsourced their various technical and legal responsibilities to AWS. Now that Docker is more mature, largely open source, way less resource intensive, and can run on almost any compute hardware made in the last 15 years (or longer), the cost/benefit analysis starts to favor moving off AWS.
Also AWS used to give out free credits like free candy. I bet most of this is vendor lock in and a lot of institutional brain drain.
by dabockster - raises hand I ran a small SaaS business in the early 2000s, pre-AWS.
Renting dedicated servers was really expensive. To the extent that it was cheaper for us to buy a 1U server and host it in a local datacenter. Maintaining that was a real pain. Getting the train to London to replace a hard drive was so much fun. CDNs were "call for pricing". EC2 was a revelation when it launched. It let us expand as needed without buying servers or paying for rack space, and try experiments without shoving everything onto one server and fiddling with Apache configs in production. Lambda made things even easier (at the expense of needing new architectures).
The thing that has changed is that renting bare metal is orders of magnitude cheaper, and comparable in price to shared hosting in the bad old days.
by ascorbic - Computing power (compute, memory, storage) has increased 100x or more since 2005, but AWS prices are not proportionally cheaper. So where you were getting a reasonable value in ~2012, that value is no longer reasonable, and by an increasing margin.by saulpw
- AWS also made huge inroads in big companies because engineering teams could run their own account off of their budget and didn’t have to go through to IT to requisition servers, which was often red tape hell. In my experience it was just as much about internal politics as the technical benefits.by throwup238
- You're falling into the false dichotomy that always comes up with these topics: as if the choice is between the cloud and renting rack space while applying your own thermal paste on the CPUs. In reality, for most people, renting dedicated servers is the goldilocks solution (not colocation with your own hardware). You get an incredible amount of power for a very reasonable price, but you don't need to drive to a datacenter to swap out a faulty PSU, the on site engineers take care of that for you. I ordered an extra server today from Hetzner. It was available 90 seconds afterwards. Using their installer I had Ubuntu 24.04 LTS up and running, and with some Ansible playbooks to finish configuration, all in all from the moment of ordering to fully operational was about 10 minutes tops. If I no longer need the server I just cancel it, the billing is per hour these days.
Bang for the buck is unmatched, and none of the endless layers of cloud abstraction getting in the way. A fixed price, predictable, unlimited bandwidth, blazing fast performance. Just you and the server, as it's meant to be. I find it a blissful way to work.
by jgb1984 - The author touches on it briefly, but I'd argue that the cloud is immensely helpful for building (and tearing down) an MVP or proving an early market for a new company using startup credits or free tiers offered by all vendors. Once a business model has been proven, individual components and the underlying infrastructure can be moved out of the cloud as soon as cost becomes a concern.
This means that teams must make an up-front architectural decision to develop apps in a server-agnostic manner, and developers must stay disciplined to keep components portable from day one, but you can get a lot of mileage out of free credits without burning dollars on any infrastructure. The biggest challenge becomes finding the time to perform these migrations among other competing priorities, such as new feature development, especially if you're growing fast.
Our startup is mostly built on Google Cloud, but I don't think our sales rep is very happy with how little we spend or that we're unwilling to "commit" to spending. The ability to move off of the cloud, or even just to another cloud, provides a lot of leverage in the negotiating seat.
Cloud vendors can also lead to an easier risk/SLA conversation for downstream customers. Depending on your business, enterprise users like to see SLAs and data privacy laws respected around the globe, and cloud providers make it easy to say "not my problem" if things are structured correctly.
by shooker435 - > This means that teams must make an up-front architectural decision to develop apps in a server-agnostic manner
Right. But none of the cloud providers encourage that mode of thinking, since they all have complete different frontends, API's, different versions of the same services (load balancers, storage) etc. Even if you standardize on k8s, the implementation can be chalk and cheese between two cloud providers. The lock in is way worse with cloud providers.
by nineteen999 - Seems like nowadays people seem less concerned with vendor lockin than they were 15 years ago. One of the reason to want to avoid lockin is to be able to move when the price gouging gets just a little bit too greedy that the move is worth the cost. One of the drawbacks of all these built in services at AWS is the expense of trying to recreate the architecture elsewhere.by PaulKeeble
- I took care of IT for a startup hedge fund once. I was the quant's right-hand man, data engineer, visualization dashboard guy, everything. The quant needed to run a monolithic C++ program daily to chew through stock data and we decided a dual-Xeon server with 512 GB RAM would be great. OVH MG-512, for those curious.
Quant happy, boss happy, all good. Then the boss goes for lunch with someone and comes back slightly disturbed. We were not buzzword compliant. Apparently the other guy made him feel that he was using outdated tech by not being on AWS, using auto-scaling etc;
Here I am, from a background where my first language was 8086 assembly, and compactness was important to me. I remember thinking, "This whole thing could run on a powerful calculator, except for the RAM requirement".
It was a good lesson for me. Most CTOs know this bias and have unnecessarily huge and wasteful budgets but make sure they keep the business heads happy in the comfort that the firm is buzzword compliant. Efficiency and compactness are a marketing liability for IT heads!
by vijucat