> All the pro-cloud talking points are just that - talking points that don't persuade anyone with any real technical understanding ...
And moreover most of the actual interesting things, like having VM templates and stateless containers, orchestration, etc. is very easy to run yourself and gets you 99.9% of the benefits of the cloud.
About just any and every service is available as container file already written for you. And if it doesn't exist, it's not hard to plumb up.
A friend of mine runs more than 700 containers (yup, seven hundreds), split over his own rack at home (half of them) and the other half on dedicated servers (he runs stuff like FlightRadar, AI models, etc.). He'll soon get his own IP addresses space. Complete "chaos monkey" ready infra where you can cut any cable and the thing shall keep working: everything is duplicated, can be spun up on demand, etc. Someone could still his entire rack and all his dedicated server, he'd still be back operational in no time.
If an individual can do that, a company, no matter its size, can do it too. And arguably 99.9% of all the companies out there don't have the need for an infra as powerful as the one most homelab enthusiast have.
And another thing: there's even two in-betweens between "cloud" and "our own hardware located at our company". First is colocating your own hardware but in a datacenter. Second is renting dedicated servers from a datacenter.
They're often ready to accept cloud-init directly.
And it's not hard. I'd say learning to configure hypervisors on bare metal, then spin VMs from templates, then running containers inside the VMs is actually much easier than learning all the idiosyncrasies of all the different cloud vendors APIs and whatnots.
Funnily enough when the pendulum swung way too far on the "cloud all the things" side, those saying at some point we'd read story about repatriation were being made fun of.
> If an individual can do that, a company, no matter its size, can do it too.
Fully agreed. I don't have physical HA – if someone stole my rack, I would be SOL – but I can easily ride out a power outage for as long as I want to be hauling cans of gasoline to my house. The rack's UPS can keep it up at full load for at least 30 minutes, and I can get my generator running and hooked up in under 10. I've done it multiple times. I can lose a single server without issue. My only SPOF is internet, and that's only by choice, since I can get both AT&T and Spectrum here, and my router supports dual-WAN with auto-failover.
> And arguably 99.9% of all the companies out there don't have the need for an infra as powerful as the one most homelab enthusiast have.
THIS. So many people have no idea how tremendously fast computers are, and how much of an impact latency has on speed. I've benchmarked my 12-year old Dells against the newest and shiniest RDS and Aurora instances on both MySQL and Postgres, and the only ones that kept up were the ones with local NVMe disks. Mine don't even technically have _local_ disks; they're NVMe via Ceph over Infiniband.
Does that scale? Of course not; as soon as you want geo-redundant, consistent writes, you _will_ have additional latency. But most smaller and medium companies don't _need_ that.
And moreover most of the actual interesting things, like having VM templates and stateless containers, orchestration, etc. is very easy to run yourself and gets you 99.9% of the benefits of the cloud.
About just any and every service is available as container file already written for you. And if it doesn't exist, it's not hard to plumb up.
A friend of mine runs more than 700 containers (yup, seven hundreds), split over his own rack at home (half of them) and the other half on dedicated servers (he runs stuff like FlightRadar, AI models, etc.). He'll soon get his own IP addresses space. Complete "chaos monkey" ready infra where you can cut any cable and the thing shall keep working: everything is duplicated, can be spun up on demand, etc. Someone could still his entire rack and all his dedicated server, he'd still be back operational in no time.
If an individual can do that, a company, no matter its size, can do it too. And arguably 99.9% of all the companies out there don't have the need for an infra as powerful as the one most homelab enthusiast have.
And another thing: there's even two in-betweens between "cloud" and "our own hardware located at our company". First is colocating your own hardware but in a datacenter. Second is renting dedicated servers from a datacenter.
They're often ready to accept cloud-init directly.
And it's not hard. I'd say learning to configure hypervisors on bare metal, then spin VMs from templates, then running containers inside the VMs is actually much easier than learning all the idiosyncrasies of all the different cloud vendors APIs and whatnots.
Funnily enough when the pendulum swung way too far on the "cloud all the things" side, those saying at some point we'd read story about repatriation were being made fun of.