Ask HN: Cloud Costs What am I missing?

6 pointsrqmedes10mo ago3 comments

One of the original promises of the cloud was reduced operational overhead—you wouldn’t need armies of sysadmins or people racking hardware. But at scale, the opposite seems to happen. We have hundreds of cloud engineers. That headcount is growing faster than any other part of R&D. The tooling, services, and interdependencies are increasingly complex, and managing reliability feels harder, not easier.

Then there’s cost. Cloud spend is rising far faster than the growth of the business, and the pricing—especially for storage—is getting harder to justify. We’ve hit the point where some parts of our cloud bill look downright absurd.

We’re not inexperienced at this—we’ve been in the cloud longer than many companies have existed.

Cloud is starting to feel like a trap, am I just an out of touch old man?

3 comments

codingdave10mo ago

Sounds like you've got the right view. Most cloud solutions are easier and cheaper when you are small, but once you scale up their costs and complexity go up, and old-school bare metal self-hosting becomes cheaper and easier again.

The trap is that people buy into so many diverse features of the cloud platforms that they don't know how to unwind from it all and just go stand up a big box (or small boxes) that runs their stuff. My recommendation is to embrace the cloud to get something rolling, but remain hyper-aware of how you would de-cloud to be sure you never lock yourself in too tightly.

icedchai10mo ago

No, you're right.

And don't forget about the vendor lock in. Once you're dependent on proprietary managed services, it will become increasingly more difficult (and expensive) to migrate out.

My advice is unless it's based on something open source (like RDS Postgres, etc.) be very, very wary. S3 has so many clones it may as well be "standard." But when you start storing everything in DynamoDB and using Lambda handlers all over the place... be careful.

The complexity can be over whelming. I've seen applications with more IaC / Terraform than actual real application code. VPC, API Gateway, Lambdas, IAM roles, permissions, security group rules, autoscaling, S3 buckets on-and-on all for a simple app that serves maybe 5 requests/sec max and could run on a small VPS. Don't worry, it's scalable though. WTF.

anenefan10mo ago

It's way over my head but aware it already was quite intricate and frustrating [1] [1a] at times.

Finding a good stable online file storage area is getting harder, especially the last few years where people have been caught out when fires or other catastrophes [2] occur.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t6L-FlfeaI [video - 2010]

[1a] https://archive.org/download/i-just-want-to-serve-5-terabyte... *A more universal link to a mp4 (15 megs) or mkv (5 megs) download as per the original youtube link since imposed restrictions youtube likes to impose on some people from time to time.

[2] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/hardware/hpe-warns-of-...

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