On Thu, 27 Jan 2022 at 09:16, Mark Tinka <mark@tinka.africa> wrote:
Saving 12 months of opex $ sounds great, except when you lose 18 months of opex $ in 2 days completely outside of your ability to control.
I don't disagree.
What this does, though, is democratize access into the industry. For a simple business model that is serving a small community with a handful of eyeballs, not trying to grow forever but put food on the table, it's somewhere to start.
I do disagree, if I understood the argument right. If the argument is 'cloud makes no business sense to anyone'. Doing the 1st server properly costs several million euros a year, since you need competent 24/7 staffing, with sick leaves, holidays (in 1st world countries where this is a thing) and attrition taken into account. Staff who can do infra, compute, storage, networking (that's 4 separate teams usually, each needing overhead for 24/7) who are comfortable with working nights. This argument 'no one should be using x, x is a fad' happens when every new technology appears, literally people object to using paper and pen, as it's too convenient for writing thereby causing quality of writing to decrease compared to stone tablets. Followed by the evilness of books, newspapers, radio, tv, internet and so forth. And always these fringe opinions that something is outright bad/good gives away to more nuanced views. I wonder if these people who object to using the cloud, object to using 3rd party data centres outright? Or accept that you don't have to build the physical premises where you put the compute, or do you have to own that too? If you don't have to own that, why not? Since it would seem a difficult position to at same time argue you can't use cloud because of lack of control, but you can use 3rd party data centres, now you're still lacking control on many types of outages. If we need to own everything, where does it end? What can we get from 3rd parties? NAND gate? Or can we at least assume we don't have to build hydrogen atoms? That we get hydrogen atoms from elsewhere and start from that? Why is it that always the objection is something contemporary but the rest of the stack is fine to be provided by a 3rd party? If you believe you're living in a special period of time, where there is fundamental change to this, your position is statistically weak. -- ++ytti