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I'm still adamant about the fact that the "cloud" is a racket.

Sure, it decreases the time necessary to get something up running, but the promises of cheaper/easier to manage/more reliable have turned out to be false. Instead of paying x on sysadmin salaries, you pay 5x to mega corps and you lose ownership of all your data and infrastructure.

I think it's bad for the environment, bad for industry practices and bad for wealth accumulation & inequality.

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I'd say it's a racket for enterprise but it makes sense for small things. For example, a friend of mine, who's in a decent bit of debt and hence on the hunt for anything that can make some money, wanted to try making essentially a Replika clone for a local market and being able to rent an H100 for 2$ an hour was very nice. He could mess around a bit, confirm it's way more work than he thought and move on to other ideas for like 10$ :D

Assuming he got it working he could have opened service without directly going further in debt with the caviat that if he messed up the pricing model, and it took off, it could have annihilated his already dead finances.

But that is not what is usually referred to as the cloud. I am not against infrastructure for rent like VPS or an H100 node, but against the behemoths of AWS, Azure and the like

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