Hacker News Reader

Comment by galois198 | Hacker News Reader

Please could you elaborate on the cloud vs on-premise comparison? Are you including the initial on-prem costs of buying the hardware?

View on HN

Yep. The expense of the cloud is crazy; in most corporate situations the expense of purchasing the same servers used by the cloud service is 1/4 your monthly cloud bill. The markup is unethically high, so they've brainwashed an entire generation of young developers and their equality naive CTOs that this is anything other than a swindle.

Running a server is child's play, people. Don't believe the hype!

People may have a strong reaction to the word "crazy", but I'm not sure what else to call it, other than "mass delusion" or "mass hallucination".

I've done this analysis for (mostly small-scale) companies for about 10 years, and, every time, the cost of using public cloud computing has been 2x-10x of running ones own servers for 3 years.

I've only had one exception, where the incremental cost of compute was 1:1, if the servers were placed in more expensive space near the other servers in the existing datacenter. Data transfer costs made cloud more expensive, of course.

> Running a server is child's play, people.

I'd say that's a bit of a hyperbole, but I agree that the incremental expertise (and time/effort) required to deal with hardware over cloud, is far from the prohibitve headache it's made out to be.

Much like in The Princess Bride, when companies say they are moving to the cloud for "cost," that word does not mean what they think it means. What they are really saying is that it is "cheaper" to swipe their corporate card for some AWS each month than it is for them to deal with the political and cognitive effort of doing it themselves. You know you can cook a better and cheaper meal at home but then you have a lot more effort than if you just go out to a restaurant and swipe your card. Same deal here, and most companies just want to get on with being a health care provider, energy company, financial services company, etc and they are willing to admit that they just don't have the stomach for IT. Going to the cloud is one of those places where they say cost but what they really mean is <networking | servers | power | etc> are _hard_.

> Going to the cloud is one of those places where they say cost but what they really mean is <networking | servers | power | etc> are _hard_.

But I (and the GP) addressed that. It just isn't hard.

Your earlier comment is closer to the truth:

> political and cognitive effort of doing it themselves

With "traditional" industries, it seems the problem is entirely political, and it actually is about cost, because cloud isn't competing against the commodity gear we've been talking about here. Cloud is competing against "enterprise" hardware, which easily costs even more than cloud, not least of which due to maintenance contracts.

There was some discussion of this (somewhat tangential to the main topic) I participated in here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17329028

Well, unless your db master fails. Do yours automatically fail over?

Of course. That's essential to any enterprise.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com