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Comment by speedgoose | Hacker News Reader

Well that's a bit more than 2 requests per second on average. Sure you may have some bursts once in a while, but nothing a 3€ VM can't manage IMHO.

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I always find it funny when people brag about cost savings on cloud services while overlooking the insane premium they're paying by using the "cloud" to begin with.

It's kinda like a construction firm using a supercar to haul materials and then bragging about their efforts to make cosmetic repairs cost-effective... maybe you could just not use an overpriced car to begin with and then damage won't be an issue?

Am I missing something? Isn't a $3 VM referring to a VM service in a cloud somewhere? If you try to do the same thing without cloud you'll have to end up renting space in a datacenter, install your own servers, connect to an ISP, power bills, etc etc. Cloud definitely seems cheaper in comparison

GP and you aren't using the same definition of cloud. By cloud, they mean infrastuctures like AWS/GCP/Azure, not simple VM hosting (called VPS outside "clouds", and compute nodes in "clouds")

What's the definition of "cloud" then which excludes VPS from the umbrella of services offered in cloud? Not really sure how a VPS is any different from a Google Compute Engine

I think the main difference is the pricing structure. Usually "cloud" refers to the auto-scaling servers with the pay-as-you go pricing, while VPSs are usually manually instantiated and have a fixed monthly cost. Also, sometimes with VPSs you get more control over the server's settings than with "cloud" services.

So "cloud" is like renting a dynamically changing number of VPSs each month and which are usually more costly if your consumption is not spiky (eg. when a cheap VPS rented 24/7 is enough).

The main advantage of the cloud for me that it provides PaaS services. You don't have to administer a VM, etc, you just use the services and it's someone else's job to install security updates and stuff.

Installing updates and stuff is easy to automate.

And sometimes automatic updates break and then the site may be down until you find the problem which may require much reading and therefore a longer time if you don't deal with sysadmin stuff often.

With PaaS it's someone else's job who does this every day.

...so someone else can install the updates that break the server? Check your SLA, no cloud provider is going to pay you much compensation when the service goes down

If you stick to LTS releases and stay away from Oracle/Java then you are highly likely to never have OS updates break the application.

The only thing I like about lambda, is that your code could easily be deployed to different geo locations

You can also easily spin up a VM in a different geographic location.

If you spun up a VM in 200 locations like Cloudflare, that $3 VPS suddenly becomes $600

That's true, but likely not as close to the customer as CF Workers on edge. And certainly not as easy, as CF does all that automatically.

A Pi should be able to handle this too.

A Pi is basically yesteryear’s beefy rack server.

A lambda is potentially cheaper if there are long periods with no execution though?

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