Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

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My theory is that the HN audience is filled with:

A) People working at cloud providers who have a financial incentive to demerit any anti-cloud sentiment

B) People who do not know what life was like before cloud and think it means that developers will have to go and build datacenters

C) People who don't really care about the cost because it's their employer that foots the bill, they just know that working in cloud pays more so they want the gravy train of inscrutable services and will ride the sunk cost fallacy.

D) People who genuinely don't understand how servers work and it scares them that someone might have different technical knowledge than them in the company... and they might be able to say no to them.

I could be wrong, but if any of the above is true then it explains why people keep bringing out the same tired arguments that show no weight (more staff/build datacenters from atoms of sand) and articles like this get flagged immediately.

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of course it could also be that the discussion becomes a tired circlejerk and lacks any intellectual curiosity, however I don't believe that.

Keep in mind that the number of devs that are inexperienced is very high. Growth in the industry has been explosive. So there is a large population of devs that just don't understand how one might reasonably live, and even prosper, on the literal server in the basement or closet. Doing so sounds scary and arcane. They have never experienced the old memes of tripping on server power cables and backhoes accidentally digging through your network line being among the more dangerous events in life.

Among the older devs, a sizable amount of them worked in large companies with ineffectual IT departments where the cloud also meant scrapping the red tape in favor of shadow-IT and actually being able to get stuff done. They, largely, think the cloud is the greatest because it materially improved their lives in poorly run organizations. So it simply must be grand.

With these motivations you can come up with any number of arguments that sound plausible to defend the cloud.

There are a few people with significant experience on both sides, that advocate for cloud. I must conclude that their experience largely falls into the few buckets where it does tend to make sense.

My experience is that cloud is insanely expensive - if you can run and keep a competent IT dept.

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