As someone who shares your skepticism of the cloud, I can say that people don’t switch from bare metal hosting (something like SoftLayer) to AWS/GCP for the cost.
If you do the math like “we have 1000 cores and 2048Gb of RAM and 10Tb of RAID’ed SSD” and then plug that in to the GCP calculator... it’s going to be at minimum 1.5-2x your bare metal cost.
That’s not even including bandwidth which is pretty much free at bare metal hosts unless you’re doing a lot of egress.
The calculus changes when you realize that you’re over-provisioned on the bare metal side for a variety of reasons: high availability, “what if”, future growth that’s more medium term than short, etc.
Then you scale back the numbers you’re plugging into the calculator and things are still expensive but now within reason.
Couple that with things like global anycast region aware load balancer, firewalls (an in-line 10GigE highly available firewall costs a lot of money), ability to spin up hundreds of cores in 5 seconds and the value proposition becomes clearer.
It still depends on your work load, but there’s a lot more to consider than just straight up monthly cost.
Totally agree. Cloud makes tons of sense if your workload is really dynamic. Lots of small players are running static workloads though because actually setting up dynamic workloads is pretty complex.
I use GCE for DNS, Storage, CDN (for fronting storage backed files), dynamic workloads that can run on preemptible instances, and scalable instances to serve published static content, but I use dedicated servers for databases, elasticsearch, redis, and application servers fronting those things.
You are right, however I think the amount of users that use cloud server instances because they really need that dynamic scalability is much smaller than the amount of users that use it just because
If you do the math like “we have 1000 cores and 2048Gb of RAM and 10Tb of RAID’ed SSD” and then plug that in to the GCP calculator... it’s going to be at minimum 1.5-2x your bare metal cost.
That’s not even including bandwidth which is pretty much free at bare metal hosts unless you’re doing a lot of egress.
The calculus changes when you realize that you’re over-provisioned on the bare metal side for a variety of reasons: high availability, “what if”, future growth that’s more medium term than short, etc.
Then you scale back the numbers you’re plugging into the calculator and things are still expensive but now within reason.
Couple that with things like global anycast region aware load balancer, firewalls (an in-line 10GigE highly available firewall costs a lot of money), ability to spin up hundreds of cores in 5 seconds and the value proposition becomes clearer.
It still depends on your work load, but there’s a lot more to consider than just straight up monthly cost.