this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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Have you considered the implications of hardware failure on uptime? And where the cost to maintain a physical hardware will come from? What about scaling requirements?
I'm not a network engineer, but I've been involved in the corporate argument of Cloud vs On-Prem. hosting for years now. The costs always come out better for Cloud when factoring in other indirect costs like facilities and labor.
Granted it's always been on the scale of hundreds of millions to billions of dollars, and I haven't run the numbers on smaller requirements. I just wouldn't want to expose additional points of failure in return for slightly lower monthly costs.
I think the cost always come out better for cloud for a given reliability level. But this is a volunteer run thing, so we won't mind if there is some more important downtime than on reddit or Twitter. I really do think that if your objective is not reaching 100% uptime but cost reduction, then on prem really becomes the cheapest option
A very good point! We don't need constant uptime. But I worry about the hidden costs of On-Prem, and worst case scenario where TheDude is on vacation somewhere and the instance crashes, it could be down for a while. It's also not a worry I would want to force on them either.
Yes, when I try to explain this to people, I always explain the bus factor concept: how many people could get hit by a bus until it becomes critical to run your business ! Running in the cloud allows you to avoid this problem, there will always be an oncall tech in the DC of your cloud provider, which is very hard to organize for an on prem system !
I guess The dudes can always give remote access to someone he trusts, but at the end of the day if a disk fail somebody got to go switch it
He mentioned colo, so it sounds like he's already decided against on-prem.