Re:Burnt $72k testing Firebase and Cloud Run and almost went...
by walrus01 on Thursday December 10, 2020 @11:15AM
(#25375240)
yes, I am serious, because as described in the original post this was somebody's test/prototype environment. Which is the ideal use case for a DIY scenario, until you're ready to send things into production.
I have seen people spend thousands of dollars on a cloud hosting platform to develop and test something when it could have been done equally well on a 4-year-old desktop PC sitting on somebody's desk. If they had only thought to bother installing the same (debian, centos, whatever) environment + packages + custom configuration on it.
Re:Burnt $72k testing Firebase and Cloud Run and almost went...
by mmcconnell1618 on Thursday December 10, 2020 @07:36PM
(#25380816)
But one big benefit of cloud providers is that you can spin up those servers for testing and when it doesn't work out as expected, you can just magically make them go away. If you're putting out the capital to buy servers in a rack, you have to use them all the time for the cost benefit to work out. A regular test environment that is used all the time? Yes, that could possibly be cheaper if you purchase the hardware but you also need to amortize the cost of purchasing new servers every 3 to 5 years to get the equivalent of the equipment provided by the cloud provider.
First, that $1200 server costs fixed money upfront, and then you pay per month for colo, and for internet, which usually includes a fixed bandwith cap or limits, with bursts which you pay for. So no, it's not fixed.
Second, a server you have to maintain, harwdare and software-wise, is much more complex, and takes much more time, than a managed service. You want a database? Install it yourself, maintain it yourself, backup it yourself, monitor it yourself. And same with everything else.
Third, there's zero redundancy in your "setup". If you want it with the most basic redundancy, you triple the costs (second server, extra networking equipment, etc.).
Fourth, geo redundancy/distributedness? Please. Good luck if you have someone far away who wants to visit your site.
Fifth, let's say you need to scale. Like, you get 10 more users today than you did yesterday, or you get featured on HN or Reddit or local news or whatever. F. You're looking at months and a lot of cash, upfront.
"A big collection of bare-metal hypervisors" makes sense in some cases, but don't pretend it doesn't come with a non-negligible time spent maintaning it and requires significant upfront capital and man hours to do the same you get easily on a public cloud platform (databases, message brokers, object storage, etc. etc . etc. etc. etc. etc.).