If you allow me a bit of pedantry, it's infinite "for all intents and purposes". It doesn't mean you can request civilizational levels of compute, but for a blog, a crud, an ETL and such, that is regular use cases with sensible scale you can absorb any elastic demand.

Having said that, I agree with you. You have to request limit increases often and can't scale even in those instances if you don't plan ahead.

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microgpt 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah but you don't need cloud for a blog. Cloud was sold as effectively infinite resources - capacity isn't infinite, or effectively infinite, it's 20% more than you are currently using and you pay 300% more for that.

There has to be a name for this deceptive marketing tactic where you say something is unlimited and then it is only unlimited as long as you don't use very much.

It would be one thing if you occasionally got a "no more capacity" error when requesting large amounts of resources but it doesn't work that way. They confine you to a relatively small amount of resources the entire time you have an account. If you want more you have to request it.

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hirako2000 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

It was sold as flexible, near instant provisioning of DC level resources. I don't recall having seen infinite anywhere.

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microgpt an hour ago | parent [-]

It's not flexible if it only flexes 20% above your current usage

	▲	sebzim4500 12 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		For 99+% of users it will flex 10000% above their current usage

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gchamonlive 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

A blog for your product, if your product is already on the cloud, is a very sensible use case for the cloud. Static one deployed to a bucket and a CDN, fast, cache on the edge, high availability.

The tiny blog sure isn't for the cloud, but also it's not the main client of the cloud.

> it's 20% more than you are currently using and you pay 300% more for that.

I'm assuming you are comparing to self hosting. Then you need to account for things that are difficult to put a price like your time maintaining a physical infrastructure and the lessons you will learn with it.

Sounds like I'm defending the big cloud, but there is a valid use that is disconsidered because it's trendy to hate on the cloud.

> They confine you to a relatively small amount of resources the entire time you have an account. If you want more you have to request it.

It's a form of KYC, nothing wrong with that.

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microgpt an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I compare cloud to non-cloud VPSes. If you compare them to self-hosting the price is even more biased against cloud, even with current RAM prices. Did you know you can get 40G or 100G dedicated internet to your colo rack for something like $2000 a month (prices vary greatly, YMMV)? Colo only makes sense if you need a fairly large quantity of compute resources, but the per-unit cost can be very good. Every other style of hosting is building on top of it with a profit margin, after all.

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tough an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

if im going to have to ask for capacity, why dont I just get my own bare metal servers then?

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hirako2000 an hour ago | parent [-]

Because you don't have to wait for weeks just for delivery. And you pay for elastic usage.

	▲	vidarh 38 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		You can order bare metal servers delivery time in minutes from any number of hosting providers and the cost difference is so huge you can afford to keep excess capacity and still come out ahead.

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vidarh 40 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Even as a small customer it's easy to hit quotas or hit availablity constraints of more unusual instance types.

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hapless an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

definitionally that's "for some intents and purposes" my man

	▲	gchamonlive 19 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		For all intents and purposes is a figure of speech, meaning in every practical sense.