The true costs of hosting in the cloud [LWN.net]

The true costs of hosting in the cloud

Posted Mar 2, 2018 7:07 UTC (Fri) by mjthayer (guest, #39183)
In reply to: The true costs of hosting in the cloud by Cyberax
Parent article: The true costs of hosting in the cloud

> So basically you're describing a home-grown AWS lookalike, with all the infrastructure needed for automatic instance management.
>
> Do you think you'll be able to beat the economy of scale that AWS (or Azure) enjoys?

Doesn't that question also apply to doing it yourself and employing people full-time to look after your infrastructure exclusively, as the article describes? I would expect this way to be less expensive than that, whereby "you get what you pay for" applies.

And of course, having people you know physically in charge of the infrastructure has certain trust implications. Not to mention that you are then generally less of a target than AWS (though also less expert at dealing with attackers, though you can also choose how much expertise you need to pay for).

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The true costs of hosting in the cloud

Posted Mar 2, 2018 19:51 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (4 responses)

> Doesn't that question also apply to doing it yourself and employing people full-time to look after your infrastructure exclusively, as the article describes? I would expect this way to be less expensive than that, whereby "you get what you pay for" applies.
I work at AWS but I'd drank Cloud Computing brand of KoolAid long before joining.

I would say that $100k per month is too low to even _start_ thinking about moving to your own infrastructure. The article's author, for example, doesn't mention multi-region and multi-AZ (Availability Zone) deployments.

On AWS it's trivially easy to launch instances in multiple datacenters (AZs) or multiple geographic regions. Just click a button on the console and you're done.

But if you're spending $100k per month then you'll have to physically dispatch your engineer to a remote DC to set up your (likely) multi-rack infrastructure. Then you'll have to worry about your supply chain. If a server in Frankfurt fails, do you have a local contact there that can supply a replacement within at most 24 hours?

> And of course, having people you know physically in charge of the infrastructure has certain trust implications.
I'd argue that cost/benefit of Amazon abusing AWS to access competitors infrastructure is simply ridiculous. Getting caught at it would result in multi-billion loss of business. And there aren't that many secrets that important to steal.

> Not to mention that you are then generally less of a target than AWS (though also less expert at dealing with attackers, though you can also choose how much expertise you need to pay for).
AWS is huge. Even if someone hacks their way into the internal control plane then they probably won't be interested in targeting your company. There are more juicy targets out there.

The true costs of hosting in the cloud

Posted Mar 4, 2018 23:40 UTC (Sun) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link] (3 responses)

I believe that is within IBM's range of products. IBM will sell you hardware and software to set up your own data center, will supply the labor to construct and/or operate your data center (running your own cloud or not), will rent you bare metal machines in an IBM data center, will rent you virtual machines in an IBM data center, or will sell you services such as a database running in an IBM data center.

The only thing I think is missing from this product spectrum is renting you space in an IBM data center to place your own equipment.

I've heard many times that people are willing to pay a premium to have their own data center because of the risk that some other tenant of a public cloud will hack them. It seems like a low risk to me, but then we have news like Spectre/Meltdown where ostensibly a program running in Company A's AWS virtual machine can see the data in Company B's AWS virtual machine, and I can believe people are willing to pay that premium.

The true costs of hosting in the cloud

Posted Mar 5, 2018 2:18 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

Well, AWS has dedicated hosts and dedicated instances (two different products) that ensure that your VMs will not share the same physical hardware as other customers.

And if you go to IBM for your software then you truly deserve what you'll get.

The true costs of hosting in the cloud

Posted Mar 6, 2018 16:49 UTC (Tue) by gfernandes (subscriber, #119910) [Link] (1 responses)

>>And if you go to IBM for your software then you truly deserve what you'll get

Hear! Hear!
:)

The true costs of hosting in the cloud

Posted Mar 8, 2018 14:48 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

SUSE Linux?

:-)

Cheers,
Wol