>You want to waste money? Hire a car, with a driver, when you need it.

> Want to save money. Learn to drive.

Oh please. As if learning to drive is the end of expenses. If you finance a car, you have monthly payments. If you don't, then you have periodic recurring maintenance bills. You always have fuel charges. You always have insurance charges. You periodically have parking charges.

I know how to drive, but do not own a car. From time to time, I hire a car, but it no where gets close to costing me the amount of owning a car would.

> People think baremetal is hard. It isn't. It does take knowledge.

This.

I always wonder how much of the "clouds" success (economic, that is) would have materialized, if the marketing term never got traction, and everyone just called it what it really is: "renting someone elses hardware without physical access, and less, if any, control over how the stack works from the metal up".

In the good 'ol days, when people wanted to put a service online, they rented the racks at a colo, and either stuffed their own hardware in or, worst case, used rented hardware.

Did that require some basic familiarity with hardware? Yes it did. Did people need to know how to setup, configure and administrate a LAMP stack? Sure. Was it guarded against sudden loadspikes by god-knows-how-many layers of abstraction? Nope.

But it worked, and surprise, in 99% of cases, it was perfectly fine if a website ran at sub-optimal speed for a few hours, or went down every now and then.

And the dirty little secret is: It still does, and it still is.

Re: Cloud. Not all cloud scenarios are the same. If the cost is amortized over a long time (theoretically infinite, well that's the plan) then the immediate convenience can outweigh the cost/opportunity cost. For example if you used Backblaze to backup one personal computer at the cost of $6/mo, if you have a lot of data that becomes a huge source of savings compared to managing the backups yourself. At that price the ROI versus other methods like building a trueNAS may not be within a decade, and I'd argue the storage enthusiasts have probably refreshed all their drives within that time and the ROI would never come even if Backblaze doubled their prices. What you do get is that self hosting becomes a hobby, and that's what I feel it is for most people.

Hiring a personal car is more expensive because you are hiring a personal employee.

That said, I still argue for personal autonomy alone learning to do the thing is better in general, but I don't think it's because it's cheaper in all scenarios. And to your point some or maybe even most cloud services are more expensive relative to their self hosted versions.

There are savings, but they require work to realize.

Let's use your driving example (because car examples are always great!)...

>You want to waste money? Hire a car, with a driver, when you need it.

>Want to save money. Learn to drive.

This is true. You can save more money if you need to drive often if you own a car. But there are two scenarios that it still makes sense to rent.

1) What if you need a car in a different city? You just flew from JFK to SFO. You already have a car in NYC, but need one in SF. You're not going to buy a car in SF that you'll need to sell in a week. Sure, if you're going to be there longer, you might consider it, but then you're still carrying the costs of two cars.

2) Sometimes you need a truck. Maybe you have an IKEA run to make to get a bunch of desks, or stop at the hardware store for a few dozen bags of mulch, or ... But sometimes you just need a truck to get the job done. You could just buy a truck and be done with it. But trucks can be more expensive than a compact car, and they definitely have higher fuel costs. In this case, you'd probably be better off with a fuel efficient (or electric) compact car and rent a truck only when you need it.

This is how you save money with the cloud. But you definitely don't save money when you effectively rent a truck to drive to work everyday (even if you are in construction). There is a cost to renting -- it is more expensive on a per-use basis than it is if you buy. Cloud servers are more expensive than bare metal -- if you're constantly using them. It is only cheaper when you stop paying for the parts you don't need. And that also takes expertise.

Once, at a new job, I inherited a cloud server. It was costing us a ton of money per month and running 24/7 because the person who set it up never turned it off. After 3 months of those costs, they could have bought a new server with no other renting. They paid for a cloud server for three reasons: 1) they had no experience with hardware, 2) it was a pain to setup local hosting, and 3) it was faster to get running without waiting for a vendor to build a server, deliver it to the datacenter, etc... These were real impediments to the first person and the cloud server helped to get them moving. They just didn't have the longer term view of what their decision was going to cost in the long term.

The first thing I did was order a new server and make friends with our datacenter ops people. And now the only thing we really use the cloud for is archival (write-once, read-never) storage. If we ever really need these data, it will be super expensive. But, if that ends up happening, we'd be happy to pay the cloud tax.

sure - but then also think about the use case - he is using a storage account, which means that inclusive in the cost is

a - replication (within region / AZ at least) b - 0 software to maintain (no need to frantically patch apache / SSL / whatever) c - super quick set up / management / logs / etc

So, yes, bare metal is (on a cpu cycle to cpu cycle / GB RAM/HDD/Bandwidth) level cheaper, but TCO can be waaaaaayyy higher.

It's the "weaving" part that has non-specific cost. If you have skill at weaving together pieces of the cloud in an optimal way, you can save money. Just like if you have skill in putting together your own infrastructure you can save money. I can see spending money on services, but I don't understand why people invest brain capacity on vendor-specific solutions.

This is such a bad and US-centric example: for anyone who lives in a place where it is easy to get around without a car, hiring a car only when you need it is a no-brainer financially and owning a car is a totally waste of money.

No, there are economies of scale. For $5/month I can get. dedicated IP address in the cloud. For me to get one myself I’d probably have to buy real estate somewhere just for starters.