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I hate Clouds - a personal perspective on why I think Clouds suck (loudwhisper.me)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I hope this won't be counted as some form of self-promotion, even though I am sharing a post from my own blog.

As a tech worker who works in a Cloud shop, I wanted to elaborate the many reasons why I find working with Clouds terrible, from multiple points of view.

I tried to organize my thoughts in a (relatively long) post, in which both technical aspects and political aspects (which are very related) are covered.

I am sure many people will have different perspectives, and this could be potentially also a nice prompt for a discussion.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Instant transactions are periodic, I don’t know any bank that runs them globally on one machine to compensate for time zones.

Ofc they don't run them on one machine. I know that UK banks have only DCs in UK. Also, the daily pattern is almost identical everyday. You spec to handle the peaks, and you are good. Even if you systems are at 20% half the day everyday, you are still saving tons of money.

Batches happen at a fixed time, are idle most of the day.

Between banks, from customer to bank they are not. Also now most circuits are going toward instant payments, so the payments are settled more frequently between banks.

My experience are banks (including UK) that are modernizing, and cloud for most apps brings brutal savings if done right, or moderate savings if getting better HA/RTO.

I want to see this happening. I work for one and I see how our company is literally bleeding from cloud costs.

But that should have been a lambda function that would cost 5 bucks a day tops

One of the most expensive product, for high loads at least. Plus you need to sign things with HSMs etc., and you want a secure environment, perhaps. So I would say...it depends.

Obviously I agree with you, you need to design rationally and not just make a dummy translation of the architecture, but you are paying for someone else to do the work + the service, cloud is going to help to delegate some responsibilities, but it can't be cheaper, especially in the long run since you are not capitalizing anything.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Not only it can be cheaper, it is cheaper in most cases... when designed correctly. And if you compare TCO, not hardware vs IaaS.

It can also be much more expensive of course, but that's almost always a skill issue.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

In most cases! Sorry, I simply don't believe it. Once you operate for 5, 10, 20 years not having capitalized anything is expensive as hell, even without the skill issue (which is not a great argument, as it is the case for almost anything).

It's almost always the case with rent vs invest.

Do you have some numbers?

I cite a couple of articles in the post, and here is a nice list of companies and orgs that run outside the Cloud (it's a bit old!) or decided to move away. Many big companies with their own DC, which is not surprising, but also smaller (Wikipedia!).

37signals also showed a huge amount of savings (it's one of the two links in the post) moving away from the cloud. Do you have any similar data that shows the opposite (like we saved X after going cloud)? I am genuinely curious

Edit: here is another one https://tech.ahrefs.com/how-ahrefs-saved-us-400m-in-3-years-by-not-going-to-the-cloud-8939dd930af8 Looking solely at the compute resources, there was an order of magnitude of difference between cloud costs and hosting costs (x11). Basically a value comparable (in reality double) to the whole revenue of the company.