Comment by MichaelCollins
3 years ago
"Cloud" means somebody else's computer. This is pithy, people here are sick of hearing it, but it's still true.
3 years ago
"Cloud" means somebody else's computer. This is pithy, people here are sick of hearing it, but it's still true.
It could be your private cloud therefore your computer. <5% of people probably have their own server. When that % changes significantly, we may need to stop saying this.
I guess 0.00001% is still < 5%
Most people in tech still use @gmail addresses, do you think regular people bother to have their own private cloud for data storage ?
There's no way it's 5%, but Gmail addresses are a pretty poor indicator to use. Hosting your own email is one of the most difficult sysadmin tasks out there because keeping your server off the blocklists is not trivial; it's becoming more and more common for blocklists to just block entire CIDR ranges if a single IP in it gets blocked. I don't fault anyone for not going down that rabbit hole.
Granted, they could be using Proton or some other alternative. But you still have the same inherent problem that someone else hosts/owns your email data.
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I think server/app deployments would need to be just a little more happy-clicky and lower friction and less risk before more non techies would venture into that space. All the "best practices" a sysadmin performs would have to be baked into it or at least be checkboxes that enable them at a cost with simple explanations of each functions cost/benefit in video format. Some VPS providers are slowly going in this direction but have quite a ways to go in my opinion. They have lowered the bar for new techies at least.
I would guess less than 5% of people even know what cloud means. Even among devs its considered pretty hardcore to host things on your own hardware.
I'm building an early stage startup where the application requirements are constant GPU usage, 30TB of VERY fast NVMe storage, 512GB of RAM, LOTS of bandwidth transfer, and roughly 130TB of local storage (dataset for training). There is no combination of abstracted API-driven cloud services that can be pieced together to do what we need to do.
I didn't want to bother dealing with the advanced calculator but the AWS EC2 instance to handle this bespoke application would be $130k/yr with one year upfront and 12 month reservation:
https://calculator.aws/#/estimate?id=b3de412ba6a7748e9acd782...
This doesn't include bandwidth (which AWS has an insane markup on) or nearly enough storage.
Needless to say you can lease the hardware from $VENDOR and host it for years with an all you can eat 10gig port. Oh and the cost is absolutely fixed - no worries about getting that shocking AWS bill we all know of.
With a lease and hosting it's still an operating expense and with Section 179 it's actually preferable from a tax standpoint.
With datacenter remote hands and vendor support you're still not dealing with hardware - you don't have to even step foot in the hosting facility. Ever. If a hardware component fails the vendor dispatches someone and it gets handled (same day). That said hardware failures are (in my experience) exceedingly rare until you get to some significant scale where it's a numbers game.
Because ec2 is OS up anyway from a dev ops standpoint it's pretty much identical.
Let's say you keep it for three years and upgrade. The old hardware is still worth something so you can repurpose, sell, trade, whatever.
Rough math but let's call this approach 1/4 the cost (but likely much less).
At AWS markup you can hire a dedicated full time person to manage just one server and still come out ahead. Want five of them around the world? Now you're saving a TON of money vs different AWS regions.
Even with this when I tell people we deployed our own hardware they look at me like I'm crazy. We have an entire generation in tech from jr devs to the C suite to investors that are terrified of hardware and will pay anything to avoid it.
Because of this they don't even know what hardware, bandwidth, etc actually costs. It's assumed the cost is whatever $BIGCLOUD offers it at. I know this is an extreme case but it probably happens more than most would think.
It's going to be an "if," not a "when." The percentage of users who want to manage their own cloud is vanishingly small. If people are sensitive to the risk of handing over their data to a trusted (well, trusted enough) corporation with a reputation to lose and money on the line, how safe should they feel putting their data on a cloud they manage, essentially stacking themselves up against every Joe Random Hacker on the Internet without the benefit of a Google, Microsoft, or Amazon SRE team to keep the shields up and the lights on 24/7?
The risk surface for self-hosting is higher, on multiple axes, than cloud-hosting. Hosting your own cloud is the "I don't trust auto mechanics so I'm going to become an auto mechanic" approach and most people have neither the time nor the talent.
I think this is missing the forest for the trees. There are plenty of products that make self-hosting seamless and transparent. Take the Ubiquiti Protect series of home video cameras as just one example of self-hosted plug-and-play.
It is a 'when' not 'if' since it is becoming easier and easier to self-host, and more people are realizing the benefits. I did it this year and convinced many others to do the same or use mine.
Hackers go after value targets which are companies or organizations holding a lot of valuable data. My little home server with social media, XMPP, Home Assistant and Nextcloud for pictures and such is not something they can do anything with. Good enough security is built into most self-hosting platforms.
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>handing over their data to a trusted (well, trusted enough) corporation with a reputation to lose and money on the line
Not sure how anyone who understands how Internet works could claim Google is in any way trusted, or trustworthy. Or has any reputation it could lose by a mere data leak.
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Self-hosted VPN for at least a narrower risk surface, in theory?
we could do that back in 1992
"Someone else's computer" would be misinformation in any other medium SOLELY because it makes it sound like it's being stored on the same kind of computer that an average person has - that another average person is using. There was a smear campaign in 2013 for cloud computing under this very message.