it does appear cheaper because you can handle the highest workloads for just a fraction of the total cost if you had to host the highest workload yourself.
Like lets say my company gets a very huge spike and lets say I wanted to be prepared for it for all times in baremetal, then I had to had a lot of vacant free metal.
But I personally believe that a dual strategy should be used, a minimum amount of stuff should be baremetal for the average traffic and only for huge spikes should cloud be used.
Except, clouds seem to be a lock-in, so people prefered the clouds untill the cloud started raining and asking them for a big ton of money.
This old tale gets always told, and it is still a lie. Since AWS exists, every five years someone calculated the cost of AWS for our PHP stuff. And the results were always the same: we could have 4 to 7 times more CPU, ram, storage and bandwidth when we just rent servers somewhere.
AWS is ridiculously expensive and renting servers was always the cheaper and better option (yes, we calculated the price for our system admins).
Never was any spike of usage, or growth, a problem for our servers and software.
By what you mean, calculated the cost of AWS for your php stuff, and saying that it was 4-7x more expensive.
Let's say you are using AWS, and your website suddenly gets 1000% spike or even more suddenly, then AWS can still host it but if you were using bare metal, you would've had to manually scale.
Other than this nice benefit of AWS, there is none other benefits aside from maybe not managing servers but with things like coolify, there isn't much managing servers I guess...
I am genuinely interested how you are quoting 4-7x, I know cloud is expensive but sheesh.
Also, one other aspect I have always considered cloud to be cheap is probably storage, maybe please elaborate on that as well.
And also what hyperscaling techniques are you currently using without AWS in case you get some really really huge unexpected traffic because that is the stuff AWS was meant for tbh
Most of the time you have a pretty good idea how much traffic you will get. Only once in 20 years we noticed that our servers are getting too much traffic, because too much people clicked on our advertising. So we stopped the ads, rented more servers and started the ads again. This took half a day and costed us a few hundred euros and that was that.
We aren't doing any hyper scaling and almost nobody needs this. We start PHP workers on a few servers and put the database on a beefy Server. What a beefy Server is, changes over time. In 2005 this was like 4 cores and 16 GB of RAM. Today you get like 24 cores and 128 GB RAM for about 200 € per month. On machines like that you can serve data for millions of users. AWS charges ridiculous amounts of money for servers like that. Also bandwidth pricing is a joke and always was.
> just a fraction of the total cost if you had to host the highest workload yourself. Like lets say my company gets a very huge spike and lets say I wanted to be prepared for it for all times in baremetal, then I had to had a lot of vacant free metal
Huh? Autoscaling turned out to be a myth. Even in k8, you cant make users wait for nodes to come online, so you have to always have spare nodes waiting. And the spare nodes must be in proportion to regular spikes you expect and additionally any unexpected spike that you estimate. Why would that be different from having extra free metal for much cheaper and simpler? Along with an easier time finding infra people who can manage that as opposed to finding expensive talent with the expensive bloat of technical knowledge that AWS today requires?
Lets face it - this is the enshittification of infra brought by the lock-in Amazon was able to lure the orgs into. First, they locked-in everyone. Now they are squeezing everyone dry.
I am not sure but aren't lambda functions literally autoscaled? maybe you are mentioning that not everything can/should be a lambda function...
and even forget about lambda function, cloudflare workers also do the same thing. I have hosted many websites on it, and the timing is literally negligible / even faster imo than trying to self host it / bare metal.
I know It feels really shitty to move to JS just for such a huge boost IMO to get cloudflare workers but boy I am in love of cloudflare workers and I know cf has some bad sales tactics but it was just this one off instance or very rarely and I think cf was in the right on that one, all be it, they miscommunicated.
Seperate the art from the artist. Seperate the sales from the tech team (for cloudflare), and you would see that cloudflare is literally great.
Though I used to believe that cf workers + r2 was best but now thinking storage should probably be done r2 + wasabi
Like lets say my company gets a very huge spike and lets say I wanted to be prepared for it for all times in baremetal, then I had to had a lot of vacant free metal.
But I personally believe that a dual strategy should be used, a minimum amount of stuff should be baremetal for the average traffic and only for huge spikes should cloud be used.
Except, clouds seem to be a lock-in, so people prefered the clouds untill the cloud started raining and asking them for a big ton of money.