Re:Why Aren't You Developing in the Cloud?
by fusiongyro on Monday April 02, 2012 @05:56PM
(#3790283)
In a way, I think reducing cost is often (not always) a necessary first step to enabling the big-picture visions you're describing. For example, cheap desalination means water for drought-struck Saharan Africans; cheap food saves lives worldwide; cheap computing leads to the situation we have today. "Moving money around" is not valueless by itself; that is, after all, what banks (and even currency itself) exist to accomplish, and manage to scrape by at it.
But again, taking your position at face value, I would counter that the level of expertise needed to maintain the data needs of most people is very modest compared to the level of expertise needed to sell everyone that amount of data at scale. If your needs are not dramatic (and most people's aren't) then "the cloud" may turn out to be more expensive than doing it yourself on top of the usual downsides of outsourcing. Not everybody has a scalability problem. And if you do have a scalability problem but your income is directly proportional to the scale, it may be cheaper to run it yourself anyway and hire those scalability experts. There are more cloud providers every year, not fewer, and Amazon and Google did it out of necessity and made a profit long before they realized they could monetize it.
In short, I think there are arguments for and against, like everything else, and people should understand the upsides and the downsides before choosing. Once the pendulum swings back there will be people leaving the cloud who probably should be there and I'll be arguing for them to use it, but for right now it seems like the herd is recklessly choosing the cloud without understanding why.
But again, taking your position at face value, I would counter that the level of expertise needed to maintain the data needs of most people is very modest compared to the level of expertise needed to sell everyone that amount of data at scale. If your needs are not dramatic (and most people's aren't) then "the cloud" may turn out to be more expensive than doing it yourself on top of the usual downsides of outsourcing. Not everybody has a scalability problem. And if you do have a scalability problem but your income is directly proportional to the scale, it may be cheaper to run it yourself anyway and hire those scalability experts. There are more cloud providers every year, not fewer, and Amazon and Google did it out of necessity and made a profit long before they realized they could monetize it.
In short, I think there are arguments for and against, like everything else, and people should understand the upsides and the downsides before choosing. Once the pendulum swings back there will be people leaving the cloud who probably should be there and I'll be arguing for them to use it, but for right now it seems like the herd is recklessly choosing the cloud without understanding why.