<story><title>The Cloud</title><url>https://txt.black/~jack/cloud.txt</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>freehunter</author><text>Man I wish HN had a downvote option for articles that are just not worth reading.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Don&amp;#x27;t go to the cloud, just buy your own servers&amp;quot; completely ignores the reason anyone rents cloud servers in the first place. If I could easily say &amp;quot;I need exactly this much capacity, no more no less, with no unexpected scaling needs and no code&amp;#x2F;infrastructure changes&amp;quot; then I&amp;#x27;d be sitting pretty. Now for a show of hands, how many companies does this describe?&lt;p&gt;And of those companies that raised their hand, how many can say &amp;quot;I&amp;#x27;m fine with just having a server in Germany&amp;quot; who will then go on to say &amp;quot;and I don&amp;#x27;t need a CDN to serve customers in other regions&amp;quot;?&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;keep running live&amp;#x2F;live setup...This is very critical&lt;p&gt;Oh I didn&amp;#x27;t know it was that easy. If all you have to do to keep a server running is say &amp;quot;stay running, it&amp;#x27;s very critical&amp;quot; then of course no one needs any managed services. Outages are solved forever.&lt;p&gt;Completely worthless advice from a text file written by... I&amp;#x27;m sorry who is this person and what authority do they have?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nostrademons</author><text>I wouldn&amp;#x27;t go so far as the author when recommending tech stacks for startups or hobby projects.  The main benefit of cloud providers is that you don&amp;#x27;t have to learn and pay attention to all the stuff he lists, and you can focus on building the software you want to build.&lt;p&gt;But I do think he&amp;#x27;s performing a useful service in highlighting &lt;i&gt;just how much you&amp;#x27;re paying&lt;/i&gt; for not having to hire a devops or sysadmin person.  10x performance differentials have been replicated not just by him but in other benchmarks.  I remember seeing a chart when I was still working at Google and GCP was being justified that showed a graph of hard disk prices vs. S3 rates - since inception (2007-2012 at this time), S3 rates had gone down by a factor of about 2-3x, but price&amp;#x2F;GB of physical hard disk space had gone down by ~100x.  Amazon is hiding all of this improvement in the physical hardware behind vCPUs and opaque billing, and it becomes pure profit to them.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m surprised more mid-size companies - those with AWS bills in the 6-figure-per-month range - don&amp;#x27;t leave the cloud, get physical hardware, and pay some sysadmins.  At that level you could easily afford them, and you probably can get old Linux greybeards cheap now that everyone thinks the job description is obsolete.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Cloud</title><url>https://txt.black/~jack/cloud.txt</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>freehunter</author><text>Man I wish HN had a downvote option for articles that are just not worth reading.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Don&amp;#x27;t go to the cloud, just buy your own servers&amp;quot; completely ignores the reason anyone rents cloud servers in the first place. If I could easily say &amp;quot;I need exactly this much capacity, no more no less, with no unexpected scaling needs and no code&amp;#x2F;infrastructure changes&amp;quot; then I&amp;#x27;d be sitting pretty. Now for a show of hands, how many companies does this describe?&lt;p&gt;And of those companies that raised their hand, how many can say &amp;quot;I&amp;#x27;m fine with just having a server in Germany&amp;quot; who will then go on to say &amp;quot;and I don&amp;#x27;t need a CDN to serve customers in other regions&amp;quot;?&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;keep running live&amp;#x2F;live setup...This is very critical&lt;p&gt;Oh I didn&amp;#x27;t know it was that easy. If all you have to do to keep a server running is say &amp;quot;stay running, it&amp;#x27;s very critical&amp;quot; then of course no one needs any managed services. Outages are solved forever.&lt;p&gt;Completely worthless advice from a text file written by... I&amp;#x27;m sorry who is this person and what authority do they have?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jumpman500</author><text>I think you’re right. But I think you and the OP are probably coming from different perspectives. Yes if you have frequent scaling issues you probably need the cloud. But a lot of companies shouldn’t have ever have scaling issues and are buying into the cloud to be hip. Just like Hadoop and other big data technologies they didn’t need in 2014.&lt;p&gt;Ya just gotta know your business needs.</text></comment>