While I love a good cloud bashing, it's really not black and white. If you're really small, it probably doesn't matter much if you're using Hetzner or AWS, but co-location might be a bit to expensive. If you run an absolutely massive company, cloud vs. self-hosted comes down to whether or not you can build tooling as good as AWS, GCP or Azure, with all the billing infrastructure and reporting.

The issues are mostly in the SME segment and where it really depends on what your business is. Do you need completely separate system for each customer? In that case, AWS is going to be easier and probably cheaper. Are you running a constant low 24/7? Then you should consider buying your own servers.

It's really hard to apply a blanket conclusion to all industries, in regards to cloud cost and whether or not it's worth it. My criticism in regards to opting for cloud is that people want all the benefits of the cloud, but not use any of the features, because that would lock them into e.g. AWS. If you're using AWS as a virtual machine platform only, there's always going to be cheaper (and maybe better) options.

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8fingerlouie a day ago | parent [-]

If you have high volume traffic depending on time of month, ie finance around ultimo/primo, you might need to scale your performance to 5-10x your normal idle load.

If running on your own data center, or renting physical/virtual machines from ie Hetzner, you will pay for that capability overhead for 30.5 days per month, when in reality you only need it for 2-3 days.

With the cloud you can simply scale dynamically, and while you end up paying more for the capacity, you only pay when you use it, meaning you save money for most of the month.

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sundache a day ago | parent | next [-]

> If running on your own data center, or renting physical/virtual machines from ie Hetzner, you will pay for that capability overhead for 30.5 days per month, when in reality you only need it for 2-3 days.

I keep seeing this take on here and it just shows most people don't actually know what you can do off the cloud. Hertzner allows you to rent servers by the hour, so you can just do that and only pay for the 2-3 days you need them.

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zelphirkalt a day ago | parent [-]

Also the GP take is kinda silly, because one pays 5-10x with the typical cloud providers in the first place, so it would be totally fine to pay that and already have it, if one is willing to spend that much.

More likely load will spread over time for most scenarios and the server will be ready to handle that with lower hardware specs.

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8fingerlouie a day ago | parent [-]

There's a reason i specifically mentioned finance, where the end and start of a month is a lot more busy than the middle of the month, as in factor 10+.

People receive paychecks, pay bills, buy stuff, with holidays (christmas, x-mas, etc) being even busier.

Load does not even out, and when you have 3 million customers or more, the load is not really insignificant. Nor can you just delay it, or rely on eventual consistency.

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a day ago | parent | next [-]

[deleted]

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sundache a day ago | parent | prev [-]

But most hosting providers allow you to just rent a server for a day or a few hours, so it's not really an argument why you have to use the cloud.

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8fingerlouie a day ago | parent [-]

The actual hardware (or virtual these days) is not the problem, but getting the 5000-10000 services properly connected with auditing, credentials and more is more trouble than most people expect.

Finance is a heavily regulated industry, so there’s a LOT of compliance that needs to happen, like segregation of duty, traceability, accountability, and other ilities.

Yes, it would probably cost less to run on Hetzner (provided their ISO audits are approved by financial authorities), but dynamically spinning up and down servers would cost more.

You also need fallback plans (regulated industry, critical infrastructure, etc).

It has literally taken years to get AWS and Azure approved in EU.

	▲	zelphirkalt a day ago \| parent [-]
		Anything that wants to adhere to GDPR should still be very careful, if not outright avoid, AWS and Azure. At most one could use an EU-isolated offspring of them, otherwise one runs into the insanity of US laws. The fact that many businesses don't care doesn't make it right.

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amrocha a day ago | parent | prev [-]

You can use the cloud to dynamically scale when needed while still running most of your own infra, best of both worlds.

Tricky networking though.

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sofixa a day ago | parent [-]

> Tricky networking though.

And data storage/locality/consistency.

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amrocha a day ago | parent [-]

Databases are rarely the bottleneck during access volume spikes in my experience. It’s really impressive how far some beefy servers and a read copy can take you.

But if that is your bottleneck you should be upgrading your DB system regardless of whether you’re on cloud or bare metal.

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8fingerlouie a day ago | parent [-]

But if your one source of truth is a single huge database, maybe on a mainframe, as is often the case with finance, and eventual consistency is a huge no go, the mainframe can become a limit regardless when you're being "hammered" by 3+ million users all wanting to check their account balance.

Yes, you can solve the problem with sharding and other tricks, but for many banks, the mainframe is still their main data storage, and it has 60+ years of legacy code on it that is not easily or quickly migrated to modern architecture.

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amrocha 18 hours ago | parent [-]

I agree with that, but I don’t understand how that’s particularly relevant to a bare metal vs cloud discussion.

Wouldn’t you need to do the work to shard regardless of where you’re running?

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8fingerlouie 17 hours ago | parent [-]

Banks running on mainframes don't shard. They just throw more hardware at the problem. The modern mainframes capacity for raw IO is insane, and much higher than what you can achieve with any PC setup. More hardware, more bandwidth, client facing applications in the cloud, database on the mainframe.

The major difference lies in infrastructure, particularly networking infrastructure. With cloud providers like Azure, AWS, etc, you can provision your vnet layout, and scale "indefinitely" on the same infrastructure. You don't need to provision new hosts, setup new secrets, or anything like that.

If a data center goes down, you can relatively easy switch to another one, though most financial institutions I know of uses hot/cold setups as hot/hot is essentially twice the money, and they rarely go down for long.

Of course it's all just regular servers underneath, so anything possible with AWS and Azure is also possible with other cloud providers, but the tooling simply isn't there (yet?).

Another issue is ISO auditor compliance. Being a regulated industry, finance (in EU at least) needs certain compliance to be fulfilled, not only regarding the services you consume, but also stuff like the physical locations, or being able to physically inspect the data center if auditors require it.

Microsoft and Amazon has this nailed. I've yet to experience a EU data center not run by FAANG meet the requirements, not that they can't. My best hope so far is probably "Lidl cloud" (forgot the name).

	▲	amrocha 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Right, the networking is the biggest hurdle in splitting up your infra. The compliance issues are another big one though, for organizations that are still scaling up and don’t have that know how using cloud is a huge advantage as well.