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Comment by nexuist | Hacker News Reader

The cloud is only able to be cost effective because they are able to utilize those fleets of big-iron computers to provide nearly infinite VMs and resources to anyone who signs up for their services. Relegating each customer to their own physical computer would raise costs so high as to essentially eliminate the purpose of the cloud's existence, and most businesses would be better off going back to their own data centers at that point.

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> Relegating each customer to their own physical computer would raise costs so high as to essentially eliminate the purpose of the cloud's existence

plenty of places rent bare metal machines, and the price doesn't seem quite that world-ending. see packet.net for instance.

and it only gets better if on the bare metal machine you get to turn off all of the performance-draining fixes.

It's actually much cheaper than cloud. It doesn't have the scaling flexibility, but that is partially compensated for by running faster, lower latency, etc. Lots of people use Cloudfront etc but still host on their own bare metal.

Isn't it still 'cloud'? It's still on a server somewhere that I don't think about, which is really all 'cloud' tends to mean.

I don't care whether Amazon use virtualisation to get me my 'instance'. They're always careful to stick with 'instance', and never to commit to 'VM'. Wise move, now that they're offering physical ('dedicated') instances [0]. Time will tell whether they take an interest in low-horsepower dedicated instances.

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/dedicated-instances/

There is a non-smooth transition from a server you own/lease and sits in specific rack in a known data centre with well understood routing and one provisioned as a dedicated instance in AWS/Azure etc that you manage with an API.

For certain kind of workloads renting bare metal is waay cheaper than VMs. What the small time bare metal providers cant compete with is all the different services sold along with the VMs. If it was just price per VM I suspect bare metal renting would be a lot more cost efficient in a lot of scenarios.

The other area they can't complete is on variable or disaster recovery scenarios, the sort where you'll reserve CPU instances, but only spin them up for your heavy load parts of the day or when you have an unexpected migration. And when you're not using them, AWS puts them on their spot market.

They're probably a bad match for when you have a single batch of work to do, like when the New York Times converted their archives, or every time Netflix has to reencode their video library.

> Relegating each customer to their own physical computer would raise costs

I'm not convinced the cost difference would be a showstopper. More little computers rather than few big computers. Same total horsepower. More motherboards, sure.

More boards, more rack space, more hardware management overhead, more and longer wiring with associated losses from resistance, bigger buildings... it's not really simple.

> More boards, more rack space

Not if they can be made smaller and packed more densely.

> more hardware management overhead

I'm not sure this is a significant issue.

> more and longer wiring

I don't think this follows. They could be clustered. A cluster could be made to look a lot like a conventional big-iron server.

We're talking about replacing a single large machine running, say, 16 VMs (each with an IP), with 16 small machines (each with an IP). Put an Ethernet switch at the last-mile and it's virtually the same, no? Different number of MAC addresses, sure.

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