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Comment by llarsson | Hacker News Reader

Cloud is taking a taxi everywhere, bare metal is owning your own car.

In one case, you pay a premium so that somebody else worries about all details and maintenance, and in the other, you take on that burden but don't pay the premium. This has always been true for everything where a service is provided to you.

Great if your needs are small or not well known because there is no initial investment, but bad in the long run.

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Not a bad analogy, but the taxi also comes with a driver, which makes it expensive but allows you to get work done in the back while you're en route. It'd be like a cloud provider that came with a devops person dedicated to you.

Except when driver decides to take couple days off and you can’t get anywhere or their cars breaks down for a day and they say it’s still within slo because the radio still worked (looking at you GCP)

Except in this analogy, a taxi breaking can be quickly replaced with another taxi, the issue is when the whole taxi network goes down which is more rare. If you had your own car, if the machine went down, it would be a lot more work to fix it yourself.

True but i can buy more cars/parts and still save money. Also it’s only rare if you judge by status page

Sure, but if you are using the taxi often enough it may be cheaper to higher a full time driver.

Assuming you are qualified to hire drivers. And know where to find a good one. This is what people forget with the cloud. That you're paying for their expertise.

Or you could hire off them?

A company could hire their own janitor, buy their own janitorial supplies and save money.

Or they can go through a 3rd party consultant to take care of it so they can focus their cycles on more important issues.

Not everyone is an infrastructure provider. Time is a limited commodity, and there are clear benefits of spending as much of your time on the core business.

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