I remember when the "cloud" hype was first beginning to make a splash.
A pillar selling point was "savings".
"Reduce your costs", they said.
"Don't worry about those expensive hardware costs", or management.
"Only pay for what you need", they said.
Until everyone was hooked and the tooling was everywhere.
Even just putting the pricing for hardware/services aside, the bandwidth charges alone are quite amazing. Most have it at $80 per TB per month. That's $80 a month for a 3mbit connection. [3mbps * 3600 seconds an hour * 24 hours * 30 days ~= 1TB]. Even if you pretended it was 6mbps for double the redundancy, that's still $80 for a 6mbit connection. I understand there's more to it than just transfer amount/speed, but this is in a place where bandwidth is supposed to be cheaper, as it's "purchased" in wholesale, yet a 1GBit upload connection could transfer 330TB in a month, which would cost over $23,000 at Microsoft/Google/Amazon.
I am not saying the cloud doesn't make sense. I love me some Firebase. CDN's are game changers. And GPU's per hour is the only way some scientists/researchers can afford to do work [although it does contribute to the NVIDIA's focusing on manufacturing high price/low volume].
That said, it's not for everyone. A cheap VPS can do a lot.
Specifically for a university or an institution with a lot of cheap/free bandwidth, on-site would not only be cheaper, but also have lower latency for its campus users and more control wise.
Also, if done right, there's a possibility of teaching the students relevant real-world solutions using the knowledge gained/within the university.
I sat out of the cloud hoopla and it cost me opportunities - Now, I am dragging my feet into it to be employable.. but the Anti-Cloud (River?) is going to be a concept. 39 signals already did a blog post and change in strategy.
I look forward to the economically lean years of 2023 and 2024 and HN front page articles about how moving away from Cloud and owning your own server is saving 'millions'.
> I sat out of the cloud hoopla and it cost me opportunities - Now, I am dragging my feet into it to be employable.
This. I work on sensors, signal processing and multi-sensor data and could always get a local prototyping rig. But the cloud got so big that I have to be at least somewhat comfortable with working in it just to stay employable.
Before sharing anything I check that it works in a Jupyter notebook running in a docker hosted on AWS getting data from some cloud bucket. But for real work I switch to Vim on a local machine with a few TBs of sensor data to experiment on and enjoy an order of magnitude speed improvement.
> I look forward to the economically lean years of 2023 and 2024 and HN front page articles about how moving away from Cloud and owning your own server is saving 'millions'.
I think there is a strong business case for this. Probably not fully off-cloud, but streamlining cloud portions for cost efficiency and going away from keeping everything in the cloud "because zero ingress costs". My 2c.
Most people don’t bother refactoring their application and leave whatever IIS garbage they have running on windows 20xx in a cloud instance (to say nothing about the windows licensing cost).
Also universities don’t have the same cost models as companies. Their labs have less money - except those institutions with large endowments - but they all have access to near limitless “slave” labor in the form of grad students and post docs.
When I was involved with univs the labs were bursting at the seams with hardware, because companies abounded who loved nothing more than dumping product on us at cheap or free, especially if we'd get students using it.
Write letters to companies you're interested in. You should have a relatively standard form letter explaining who you are, what the university is, how great it is, etc, etc. We got a moderate hit rate on those (higher if you consider discounts).
Look through donor and alumni records for big name companies.
Savings is a really complicated thing to measure, especially when you're trying to accurately account for internal costs which aren't cleanly broken down per-project. It's very easy to get an itemized bill from a cloud provider which looks much larger than your internal service because the latter numbers don't include staffing or overhead costs (e.g. how much idle hardware are you paying for because the alternative is telling someone they can't have a VM until you complete a new procurement?). What I've found is that almost every time someone tries to get those internal numbers it goes the other direction by a significant margin because they weren't accounting for things like how much staff time they spend managing systems, especially for the compliance type stuff.
One really big factor here is opportunity cost: if it takes 6 months (not hyperbole in .edu) to get a new server from the enterprise IT department from request to being in service and correctly configured, there's a significant cost which you don't receive on an invoice. This is especially true if you're looking for any service more advanced than a bare Linux/Windows install where the staffing & internal barriers are going to dominate the true cost.
Network bandwidth is definitely the most egregious point to complain about with commercial cloud providers and it'll cancel out any other savings for some applications. You can negotiate significant discounts with most of them and for something like UC Berkeley I'd also assume they might be able to take advantage of things like AWS' cheaper peering using Internet 2, but it's still something I'd mention to your sales rep as a deterrent any chance you get.
6 months is fast. I sold our first on premise customer. $1M internal budget to simply hook up the hardware. The project was delayed a year due to budgeting and logistical issues. And this is a large financial institution, which is used to managing on premise hardware.
Also, it's expensive, but cloud is a competitive strength. If you manage your own hardware or VPS, that is not only a reliability risk, but a huge competitive weakness in B2B. One of our competitors use "we are the only true cloud vendor" as FUD.
Reducing cost was always about 1) getting rid of the hardware infrastructure team and 2) getting rid of the tax of having to think about the hardware as a CIO
"Reduce your costs", they said. "Don't worry about those expensive hardware costs", or management. "Only pay for what you need", they said.
Until everyone was hooked and the tooling was everywhere.
Even just putting the pricing for hardware/services aside, the bandwidth charges alone are quite amazing. Most have it at $80 per TB per month. That's $80 a month for a 3mbit connection. [3mbps * 3600 seconds an hour * 24 hours * 30 days ~= 1TB]. Even if you pretended it was 6mbps for double the redundancy, that's still $80 for a 6mbit connection. I understand there's more to it than just transfer amount/speed, but this is in a place where bandwidth is supposed to be cheaper, as it's "purchased" in wholesale, yet a 1GBit upload connection could transfer 330TB in a month, which would cost over $23,000 at Microsoft/Google/Amazon.
I am not saying the cloud doesn't make sense. I love me some Firebase. CDN's are game changers. And GPU's per hour is the only way some scientists/researchers can afford to do work [although it does contribute to the NVIDIA's focusing on manufacturing high price/low volume].
That said, it's not for everyone. A cheap VPS can do a lot.
Specifically for a university or an institution with a lot of cheap/free bandwidth, on-site would not only be cheaper, but also have lower latency for its campus users and more control wise.
Also, if done right, there's a possibility of teaching the students relevant real-world solutions using the knowledge gained/within the university.