I'm running both physical hardware and cloud stuff for different customers. The problem with maintaining physical hardware is getting a team of people with relevant skills together, not the actual work - the effort is small enough that you can't justify hiring a dedicated network guy, for example, and same applies for other specialities, so you need people capable of debugging and maintaining a wide variety of things.

Getting those always was difficult - and (partially thanks to the cloud stuff) it has become even more difficult by now.

The actual overhead - even when you're racking the stuff yourself - is minimal. "Put the server in the rack and cable it up" is not hard - my last rack was filled by a high school student in a part of an afternoon, after explaining once how to cable and label everything. I didn't need to correct anything - which is a better result than many highly paid people I've worked with...

So paying for remote hands in the DC, or - if you're big enough - just order complete racks with racked and pre-cabled servers gets rid of the "put the hardware in".

Next step is firmware patching and bootstrapping - that happens automatically via network boot. After that it's provisioning the containers/VMs to run on there - which at this stage isn't different from how you'd provision it in the cloud.

You do have some minor overhead for hardware monitoring - but you hopefully have some monitoring solution anyway, so adding hardware, and maybe have the DC guys walk past and inform you of any red LEDs isn't much of an overhead. If hardware fails you can just fail over to a different system - the cost difference to cloud is so big that just having those spare systems is worth it.

I'm not at all surprised by those numbers - about two years ago somebody was considering moving our stuff into the cloud, and asked us to do some math. We'd have ended up paying roughly our yearly hardware budget (including the hours spent on working with hardware we wouldn't have with a cloud) to host a single of one of our largest servers in the cloud - and we'd have to pay that every year again, while with our own hardware and proper maintenance planned we can let old servers we paid for years ago slowly age out naturally.

They're using a third party called deft to manage the hardware. Which is a reasonable middleground between cloud and self-operated, the more I think about it.

I haven't seen a lot of info on what the cost of that management is though but it's likely to be leagues less than AWS/GCP

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"An entire data center" is 8 rented racks in two enterprise data centers (4 racks in each). They're paying $60K/month for racks, cooling, and location.

If there's anything that 3 decades in Tech have taught me is that fad-following commonly rules it, even with the supposedly logical (but not really) techies.

Cloud storage and cloud computing became a fad about a decade ago (I still remember the hype repeated by people who had never actually designed distruted systems) so there were tons of people jumping headfirst without a plan into it for the hype and the seemingly cheaper price (if you didn't think your needs and future evolution through) even though it wasn't the best choice for them.

No doubt well see the same kind of fad-following over making-sense-for-us thing with the latest hype-train: AI.

I hate the obsession to move to the cloud and the obsession towards serverless or functions.

Functions are stupid and crazy for anything that is actually used often.

For small utilities, they make a ton of sense, but next time I see an app with millions of requests per day using functions, I'm going to lose my mind.

Lock-in is quite an old strategy in Tech (back in the day Microsoft's dominance was built on it) and apparently every new generation needs to learn their lesson...

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DHH is a contrarian. Any benefits of the cloud he might get are overridden by the fact that he needs to be different (and blog about it).

See his stances on Typescript, workplace inclusion, TDD, etc.

This is part of a series of posts he has done about find out his cloud bill was stupid high because they do computationally heavy software and switching over to collocation. But the whole going from 100% cloud to colo and saving that much money is not to be scoffed at.

He does say this is an outlier and others won't get as much roi as they have.

there are a number of blog posts that have different details about the how/why, etc. i just followed the links in the article to other parts of the series.

I expect that the use case is more prevalent than you think, where you are spending a decent chunk on cloud infra. I have been convinced for some time now that the costs are high compared to our on-prem. I really like the idea of a the "deft" type hardware management service, so that look after the DCs, hardware and connectivity, and we look after the software.

Having your compute in "the cloud" doesn't remove the need for a good backup strategy, it just changes how it works. Yes, disaster recover for natural disasters should be easier (OHV's fire showed that this may not always be true). But, that doesn't cover cases like ransomware, insider threats, data mistakes or any other case where data is corrupted/modified by mistake. You still need a plan for these cases. And cloud based backups actually make a lot of sense.

But, just because you put your backups in the cloud, doesn't mean that your compute should be there as well. There is an advantage that your Time to Recovery is likely lower with both backups and compute in the same cloud. But, is that worth the ongoing cost of running your compute in the cloud? That needs to be considered separately. You also need to consider the cost of running on-prem versus in the cloud. If you have fairly predictable, static loads, it may be cheaper to buy and run servers yourself. For hard to predict, elastic loads, cloud may make more financial sense.

As others have said before, there was a period where companies were just going to the cloud for the sole reason that it was the popular thing to do. For some it actually made financial sense. For some, it didn't. The OP's article seems to be the latter.

So how then people using this *miraculous and incredibly safe * (/s) cloud lost their data in OVH datacenter fire?

There are also many organizations that wish they has some local backups after their cloud service providers lost all their data. Lesson to learn: Backup properly with offline storage. Tape in a safe, maybe even off-site, etc.

How do you know?