The battle of the computing clouds is intensifying

Re:The battle of the computing clouds is intensifying by AnIdiotOnTheNet on Tuesday December 14, 2021 @09:31AM (#29551875)

> In today's world, we need the ability to spin up and down deployments very quickly.

Do you really? In my experience, admittedly outside of SV, pretty much nobody needs that.

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Re:The battle of the computing clouds is intensifying by zbentley on Tuesday December 14, 2021 @10:09AM (#29552345)

I think this is a common need, even in smaller organizations. Spinning up/down deployments doesn't imply you're doing it in response to scale needs (most orgs don't have those); often it means you're simply experimenting with new tools or new product offerings. Having the ability to do that without waiting for infrastructure provisioning, and having the ability to only spin up the resources you need to see (for example) if a given version of a web framework can run your site well, or of a new database meets your needs, can be a significant value add.

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Re:The battle of the computing clouds is intensifying by AnIdiotOnTheNet on Tuesday December 14, 2021 @10:12AM (#29552382)

> often it means you're simply experimenting with new tools or new product offerings.

That only makes sense to me in the context of a business being an IT shop to begin with. Most businesses aren't, and their new product offerings require factories and dies and labor and materials. Besides which, the problem of provisioning is entirely overblown for this scale of business. I can spin up new servers all day on our on-prem vSphere cluster.

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Re:The battle of the computing clouds is intensifying by dagw on Tuesday December 14, 2021 @10:57AM (#29552958)

sense to me in the context of a business being an IT shop to begin with.

Lots of businesses outside of 'IT shops' use computers. I currently work in Civil Engineering and more and more of our product and service offerings have an IT/Online/Web based component which involves setting up some sort server.

I can spin up new servers all day on our on-prem vSphere cluster.

I what price? At my old job an on-perm vSphere 'machine' cost my department a lot more than what AWS was charging.

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Re:The battle of the computing clouds is intensifying by AnIdiotOnTheNet on Tuesday December 14, 2021 @11:24AM (#29553353)

We've had the same vSphere cluster for 5 years now. I forget what it initially cost, but over the timespan in question I think it would be very difficult for Cloud-anything to cost less. Hell, the licensing for the software we use to do business costs an order of magnitude more.

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Re:The battle of the computing clouds is intensifying by dagw on Tuesday December 14, 2021 @10:50AM (#29552882)

I work in a very boring industry very far away from SV and spinning up and down machines for doing calculations and analysis is a godsend. I have a 'cluster' of 6 machines with 128 GB of RAM each set up and ready that I can start up with a script and only pay for the less than 200 hours a year I actually need them. Sometimes however I need 256 GB of RAM so I just change a parameter in my script and, magic, I have 256 GB of RAM. For other workloads the optimal setup might be 100 1 core machines with 2 GB each. So I type some commands, and now I have that instead.

And since it's my 'private' cluster I don't have to worry about queuing my jobs and waiting for the machines to be free. There is no way my department would have bought me those machines as physical hardware.

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Re:The battle of the computing clouds is intensifying by arcbyte on Tuesday December 14, 2021 @10:27AM (#29552564)

Fortune 500 companies have hundreds of internal apps that each have their own stack. Multiply 2 or 3 for lower environments.

At that scale in a single company the ability to provision verticals weighs heavily in architecture and design choices.

"Should we spin this new feature out as a microservice or fold it into an existing app so we don't have to wait weeks and do crazy cost accounting for new environments?" And the answer has follow-on effects because now it has to be accounted for in a specific teams' backlog and we encounter yet more waiting.

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Re:The battle of the computing clouds is intensifying by handrous on Tuesday December 14, 2021 @11:56AM (#29553921)

It's a need born of our tooling. The only way to stay sane is to operate extremely simple services, or to put every service in its own container (or VM) that can be torn down and re-created automatically. The result is a need for one or both of: excellent container deployment tools; fast & easy ways to spin up "a new machine" (a VM) on demand.

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