But it's also someone else's economies of scale. The chances of me getting datacenter space, hardware, bandwidth, and expert 24/7 staffing at the same volume discounts they do is... slim. Particularly for the small amounts I'd need.
How small... ovh, hetzener are both a thing and cheap as chips if your VPS sized. You just have to plan ahead for what you're doing and how you want to scale it. It requires a bit more upfront thought... but if your on a budget (personal project scale) knowing that you have a FIXED COST is pretty good for sleeping easy at night.
Sometimes it makes sense to move to a lower level of abstraction, for performance, cost, or compatibility reasons. In this case, diving under the cloud and running your own servers could save 30% of your server costs.
Cloud adoption has shown that many (most?) companies prefer the convenience over cost savings. Maybe optimizing hardware spend is not the best way to optimize a business.
If you are the owner who foots the bill and has the capability to run your own infra then nothing beats it. If you don't have the capability then cloud throws you the lifeline at a price of course. Pay for it and be happy.
If you are the guy who runs/manages the infra for someone: then there is no point in saving dollars. You peddle Kubernetes and go to the kubecon and post all about it on linkedin and establish yourself as a kubernetes expert. When the owner of current gig goes under, you will have a bunch of job offers to pick from.
Besides, kubernetes solves a problem very elegantly that most companies do not have. Not everyone is google and running apps on web scale with an expectation of 99.99% uptime...
There are a lot of projects where the bandwidth charges alone would make self-managed on-prem come out ahead, and I'm not even talking the instant 2-3x performance boost you get by moving to real hardware instead of overprovisioned cloud VM hosts.
At this scale ovh, hetzner are the solutions. If your that small fixed fee pricing is a HUGE win.
I get even better than their margins. In the neighborhood of 100x cheaper. It's not rocket science.
> equivalent availability
AWS availability isn't all that super great. Most of their services are rated for only 99.95 before they offer pittance credits. That's not difficult to meet with a single computer...
> scalability
A service only needs good enough scalability. Auto scaling is also a bug, not just a feature. Remember that it is also tied to auto billing. I can't afford to have my wallet DDOSed.
> security
Security is always a problem that needs to be solved. You don't get an auto pass on security needs because you signed up for AWS.
> support
You have to pay for that.... You can get it from other vendors too if you have budget for it.
> ecosystem
This is flat out wrong. Compare AWS offerings to the breadth and depth of open source offerings and the latter comes out far ahead.
I'm expected to write a service like s3?
Do you just need a place to stash files so your multiple application servers can read them? An NFS export over a private network can very well be all you need, and you can have that file server back itself up to S3/etc at regular intervals.
I see Kubernetes as an enabler. Grab some commodity hardware - your own or Linode - and have a cloud experience using open-source components.
I just wish Kubernetes wasn’t so darn complicated.
Cachable, scalable apps that you write as part of a web-centric business are ones that use in-application level knowledge to coordinate with the web framework to use caching services at each level of depth of the stack, be it 3rd-party Cloudflare or DIY CDNs (varnish/squid), memcache/NoSQL/database-level.
Maybe some people do need a trailer, maybe some do not. As long as you don't blindly follow the cloud you can also profit from them.
And you can be part of it really only by doing cloud native stuff like Lambda, DynamoDB et al.
Cattle not pets right?
Well, no. Have you seen amazons AWS margins? Its 30%.
After amazon buys hardware, pays people to run it, it still makes 30%. Not having hardware is someone else's profit.
That isnt cattle, its contract poultry farming.
Learn capacity planing. Learn to write cachable, scalable apps. Track your hardware spend per customer. Learn about assets vs liablity (hang out with the accountants, they are nerds too). Do some engineering dont just be a feature factory. And if you are going to build features, make fuckin sure that you build tracking into them and hold the product teams feet to the fire when the numbers dont add up (see: friends with accountants, and tracking money).