Comment by arthurcolle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by arthurcolle | Hacker News Reader

Cloud computing is kind of a joke. Yeah keep paying someone for shared "virtual computers", that sounds suspiciously similar to shared hosting from a decade or 2 ago... Oh but this is different, you get isolation from containers/VMs! Yeah ok, meanwhile new exploits emerge every couple weeks. It's like tech debt ideology on steroids... just keep pumping out instances until the company either goes hyperbolic, or goes bankrupt. Realistically, just buy a few physical servers and actually work to build efficiency into the system instead of just throwing compute at your public-facing web app.

I recently bought a DELL r710 just for fun and was pleasantly surprised how even days after spinning up a bunch of VMs, I don't have a 30gb logfile for all the failed attempts at getting into my instance (this was my experience recently with 2 cloud providers!)

It'll be interesting to see how the mkt reacts when you have a "first-of-its-kind" massive, massive security breach that affect popular "pure play" internet companies hosted on top of the mythical "cloud."

Seriously, $READER, look at your cloud computing-dependent startup, and calculate egress costs for your storage, as if you HAD to stop using cloud tomorrow. How much does it cost you? How could you adapt? It's designed to keep you dependent on 3rd parties... Idk, IMO it is really not great.

I see one really positive point in cloud computing and that is that I can soundly sleep at night :)

Of course, cloud is overpriced, slow, and suffers from noisy neighbors. And keeping things running in the cloud is about the same amount of work as keeping it running on bare-metal. But for customer-visible things, I want to use cloud so that someone else has to get up in the middle of the night when apache crashes.

Sleeping peacefully makes it worth for me to pay $5,000 monthly to Heroku when 2-3x $100 bare metal servers would do. Plus I can cheaply insure against supplier negligence, whereas insuring against employee negligence would be much more expensive.

I like to think that most innovation in IT is driven by people being woken up at 3am..

Innovations like... the cloud?

Also important: turning over a finished project to a client who just wants to run the workload and doesn't want to hire full time sysadmins.

Noisy neighbors tracking can be automated and partially solved then. With cloud you gain access to the provisioning API and with Terraform/Ansible stack (as for example) you are able to build up and manage infra quickly, efficiently and declaratively. Bare metal provisioning can also be automated (as via private cloud solution, for example) but you need dedicated team for that (and nice OpenStackers aren't cheap). I was solo managing 500+ hosts once on public cloud, there is no chance you can do this without what you call "hipster tech" and modern devops toolchain.

Yeah, and when the server dies at 2am on a Sunday, nobody going to get any calls from our partners, that their clients cannot pay and they are loosing money because of us so when our website is going to be up on full capacity. Because the autoscaler dealt with it and all I got is a text that a faulty instance is gone and a healthy has been brought up.

I wonder how you would solve that with a few physical server.

> I wonder how you would solve that with a few physical server.

They won't. I think a lot of these people are skeptical of cloud computing have never worked on a product that serves to millions of users every hour and get smashed during rush hours. To me, "why not just get bunch of bare metal computers" is laughable.

> I recently bought a DELL r710 just for fun and was pleasantly surprised how even days after spinning up a bunch of VMs, I don't have a 30gb logfile for all the failed attempts at getting into my instance (this was my experience recently with 2 cloud providers!)

That's weird. I run a couple of servers myself, recently installed Asterisk on one of them and in under a minute it was under a constant barrage of automated scanners.

I guess our firewall configuration must be different. What are you using to run VMs, if that's your use case? I'm using proxmox, but I'm curious to hear what your setup is like.

Bare metal at Strato. I got fail2ban in place, but still - for services that you need to have reachable on the Internet on standard ports (web, asterisk) they normally should be plagued by automated scanners the second you open the ports.

Too bad that it never got implemented in DNS to specify the ports there (e.g. example.com would have an A record for the IP address and another record for the port)...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com