<story><title>The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox (2021)</title><url>https://a16z.com/the-cost-of-cloud-a-trillion-dollar-paradox/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bamazizi</author><text>Interesting to see this article again since it was the trigger of starting a homelab for me. After realizing cloud services are putting a major dent in my pocket to get a lousy startup idea off the ground, I started to wonder if there&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;The Cheapest&amp;quot; way? (I&amp;#x27;m not cheap but I&amp;#x27;m very frugal)&lt;p&gt;Nowadays internet speed is great to do self hosting. I have a business line internet at home with ~1gb up&amp;amp;down! Bought couple of 6-7 year old enterprise Dell servers (2x12core xeon, 128gb ram each) and no longer pay any cloud provider ... i&amp;#x27;m also hosting 2 backend solutions for mobile apps with decent traffic for friends&amp;#x27; startups!&lt;p&gt;The learning experience has been tremendous! It has actually gotten a lot better and easier with new solutions coming out for homelabs. Get started with Proxmox clusters and go from there...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nonrandomstring</author><text>After this talk [0] I had several most interesting conversations with
media folks about the real cost and advantages of &amp;quot;cloud&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;One thing that came up is development. Modern devops culture is quite
a good thing, and what&amp;#x27;s lovely about &amp;quot;cloud&amp;quot; - as in the ability to
quickly buy compute and storage capability - is that ideas you would
have tinkered with in on-prem labs (or across private sites) for
months can be imagined and prototyped in hours.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m a big advocate of rapid prototyping as a _huge_ business lever,
because the ability to try out ideas quickly, to easily reconfigure
things, is the key for time to market. You can quickly see if
something is going to fly or not.&lt;p&gt;And that&amp;#x27;s where the advantage ends.&lt;p&gt;After that, it&amp;#x27;s all downhill. Asymmetry. Lock-in and portability.
Trust and privacy issues. Security perimeters. Unpredictable costs....&lt;p&gt;So the way forward is to render unto Caesar only the things that are
Caesar&amp;#x27;s.... in other words, take the advantages of &amp;quot;cloud&amp;quot; when it
suits you, and then get the hell out of Dodge.&lt;p&gt;What is ongoing from that conversation is media companies being
interested in strategic planning to build, and even share, their own
distributed computing resources to pull back to once a technology is
off the ground.&lt;p&gt;Someone even mentioned that it&amp;#x27;s time for a European Cloud initiative,&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=6OL2XmlgpdA&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=6OL2XmlgpdA&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox (2021)</title><url>https://a16z.com/the-cost-of-cloud-a-trillion-dollar-paradox/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bamazizi</author><text>Interesting to see this article again since it was the trigger of starting a homelab for me. After realizing cloud services are putting a major dent in my pocket to get a lousy startup idea off the ground, I started to wonder if there&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;The Cheapest&amp;quot; way? (I&amp;#x27;m not cheap but I&amp;#x27;m very frugal)&lt;p&gt;Nowadays internet speed is great to do self hosting. I have a business line internet at home with ~1gb up&amp;amp;down! Bought couple of 6-7 year old enterprise Dell servers (2x12core xeon, 128gb ram each) and no longer pay any cloud provider ... i&amp;#x27;m also hosting 2 backend solutions for mobile apps with decent traffic for friends&amp;#x27; startups!&lt;p&gt;The learning experience has been tremendous! It has actually gotten a lot better and easier with new solutions coming out for homelabs. Get started with Proxmox clusters and go from there...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>p1necone</author><text>Yeah the delta in cost&amp;#x2F;CPU&amp;#x2F;memory&amp;#x2F;storage between self hosting on second hand stuff and paying cloud services is &lt;i&gt;insane&lt;/i&gt;. It&amp;#x27;s a no brainer if your use case needs beefier hardware than the typical $5&amp;#x2F;month VPS host and you don&amp;#x27;t have enterprise level liability&amp;#x2F;uptime expectations.&lt;p&gt;With stuff like proxmox you get a pretty similar level of ease of use to managed VM services too.</text></comment>