> as opposed to the extreme flexibility of using a cloud provider.
I don't really buy this honestly.
What you buy with cloud providers is quality tooling, not flexibility.
If you're bin-packing with Kubernetes properly then capacity is capacity and it doesn't matter if the marketing department are using it or the developers are. You just buy a bunch of servers and when you see the load approaching 70% you buy more. It's a 2 person job.
Is it harder? Yes. Definitely.
Is it a panacea? No. Not at all.
Is it universally cheaper? Also no. Definitely not.
I feel like whenever I talk about the Cloud as an expensive thing that people get emotionally defensive.
I'm not here to take your toys away.
Services like cloud are just tools and tools always have pros and cons.
If you can't reasonably discuss the con's without resorting to "I need to hire more staff" or "its a lot better than $strawman" then we're just cargo culting.
> it’s not really a good option for any business that needs consistent operations and uptime.
Most business cases for computers can just eat the downtime honestly. Your URL redirector doesn't need 5 9's. There's a grading scale of complexity and uptime, on one side you have a single hosted server that has profoundly strong uptime (especially with the redundancies in normal servers); then you start adding complexity to get HA, and weirdly: the complexity lowers the reliability.
If you keep following the line of redundancies and HA complexity, eventually you can get to a point where the service is even more reliable than a single node. Which is what everyone assumes they will get straight away, but usually it's a lot of work to get there.
> the trivial cost savings
This will differ a lot.
I made two games, one was hybrid-cloud and one was bare metal only; the cost savings were not trivial. If we had 100% clouded the hybrid deployment we would easily have paid 10x in the hosting costs which would have been enough money to pay for 250 contractors at a premium rate.
I don't really buy this honestly.
What you buy with cloud providers is quality tooling, not flexibility.
If you're bin-packing with Kubernetes properly then capacity is capacity and it doesn't matter if the marketing department are using it or the developers are. You just buy a bunch of servers and when you see the load approaching 70% you buy more. It's a 2 person job.
Is it harder? Yes. Definitely.
Is it a panacea? No. Not at all.
Is it universally cheaper? Also no. Definitely not.
I feel like whenever I talk about the Cloud as an expensive thing that people get emotionally defensive.
I'm not here to take your toys away.
Services like cloud are just tools and tools always have pros and cons.
If you can't reasonably discuss the con's without resorting to "I need to hire more staff" or "its a lot better than $strawman" then we're just cargo culting.
> it’s not really a good option for any business that needs consistent operations and uptime.
Most business cases for computers can just eat the downtime honestly. Your URL redirector doesn't need 5 9's. There's a grading scale of complexity and uptime, on one side you have a single hosted server that has profoundly strong uptime (especially with the redundancies in normal servers); then you start adding complexity to get HA, and weirdly: the complexity lowers the reliability.
If you keep following the line of redundancies and HA complexity, eventually you can get to a point where the service is even more reliable than a single node. Which is what everyone assumes they will get straight away, but usually it's a lot of work to get there.
> the trivial cost savings
This will differ a lot.
I made two games, one was hybrid-cloud and one was bare metal only; the cost savings were not trivial. If we had 100% clouded the hybrid deployment we would easily have paid 10x in the hosting costs which would have been enough money to pay for 250 contractors at a premium rate.
That said: the toys were definitely shiny.