upvote

points

by londons_explore5 hours ago |
comments
upvoteby gchamonlive4 hours ago|
[-]
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.

reply
upvoteby microgpt4 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.

reply
upvoteby hirako20003 hours ago|
parent|
next
[-]
It was sold as flexible, near instant provisioning of DC level resources. I don't recall having seen infinite anywhere.
reply
upvoteby microgpt3 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
It's not flexible if it only flexes 20% above your current usage
reply
upvoteby sebzim45002 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
For 99+% of users it will flex 10000% above their current usage
reply
upvoteby microgpt1 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
Then 99+% of users could save three quarters of their costs by switching to a traditional VPS provider.
reply
upvoteby gchamonlive4 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.

reply
upvoteby microgpt3 hours 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.
reply
upvoteby tough3 hours ago|
parent|
prev|
[-]
if im going to have to ask for capacity, why dont I just get my own bare metal servers then?
reply
upvoteby hirako20003 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
Because you don't have to wait for weeks just for delivery. And you pay for elastic usage.
reply
upvoteby vidarh2 hours 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.
reply
upvoteby tough2 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
I run the CI infra for our company, and our bare metal costs (sans my salary baked in), are one order of magnitude less than if using any other CI saas provider like github or others.

Like literally 10x times more expensive to do so, to run CI jobs...

I dont want to imagine the margin AWS has like generally, cause it can easily be a 90% too

reply
upvoteby microgpt1 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
Right? It's actually crazy how much they don't cost. Are you using it more than 10%? If so, you're saving money.

I assume you're using your owned server and not a provider like Hetzner? So you did have a substantial delivery time. Although in my city is a recycled that resells used servers, and I could show up there with a truck and get a server within hours if I'm not too picky. Or use some random desktop or laptop off the pile, short-term.

reply
upvoteby tough59 minutes ago|
parent|
[-]
No we're on hetzner/ovh boxes, so delivery time really isnt an issue.

Right now the biggest issue is the vibe coded CI program is not really meant to be a distributed multi-node thing yet, so we're on the biggest machines (there's some newer bigger stuff we could migrate too) and the only issue is on peak hours queue can get a bit slow.. but that was also some other bugs etc making not ideal.

Tbh it works pretty well, we just need now to scale it to more than one node etc (which is not to say that is easy, but still, x10 headroom to work with)

reply
upvoteby vidarh2 hours ago|
parent|
prev|
next
[-]
Even as a small customer it's easy to hit quotas or hit availablity constraints of more unusual instance types.
reply
upvoteby hapless3 hours ago|
parent|
prev|
[-]
definitionally that's "for some intents and purposes" my man
reply
upvoteby gchamonlive2 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
For all intents and purposes is a figure of speech, meaning in every practical sense.
reply