Sure, like any other high-level fictional situation you can surely come up with many valid fictional counter-points of your own, but cloud hosting is popular for a reason.
And I think in most cases companies want to focus their employees and efforts on their core business, and if that doesn't include setting up and maintaining hardware in the long-term, then you don't build, you buy.
Often times companies move because their organization doesn't deliver, and the hope is a cloud company will do a better job of it.
If you have a great team, I firmly believe hosting yourself is far, far, far less expensive.
If you have a terrible team, then cloud (hosting) is less expensive. Even if it was exactly the same cost, you're gaining by not having to have a staff to run it, and the costs of managing them, etc etc.
Most places don't have great teams. Insert random corporation here likely has a team that is a mess for whatever reasons happen in large companies.
In that case, the Cloud makes a ton of sense for them. They've already screwed up their own organization in some way, and this is a large reset button on the whole thing.
Not saying that cloud over dedicated host is the answer. Saying that it is an important question (and the answer should be application-specific).
When you find your business decisions going against the herd, you should really ask yourself WHY you're going against the herd, because our herd is pretty smart. That doesn't mean you should never go against, just that you should make sure you're thinking it through.
I think the first point is the most important, expect downtime.
The trouble is, a lot of these cloud services have one big sales pitch, and it is based on the improved ease of mangement and reliability you get from outsourcing to them instead of letting your own in-house IT team run things on your own systems. If it turns out that hosting in the cloud isn't really any more reliable than doing stuff in-house -- and yes, I did tell a lot of people so, and so did many others who looked at the facts rather than the hype -- then you've just undermined the main argument for using these services.
The rest is a cost issue, whether it's cheaper to use scalable, cloud-based resources or to buy in whatever big iron you need, and to some extent whether it's cheaper to hire smart people to maintain your systems or to outsource the management work. I think most of us who've looked into it know the answer to that one, which is that unless you really do have a very dynamic system where your resource needs vary by orders of magnitude within a short space of time, cloud hosting is disproportionately expensive at almost any scale even taking overheads into account.
For the same reason, there will always be people who tell you how stupid you are for moving your servers into the cloud. You could just host them yourself, don't you know that?
And that's a valid choice to make when your margins are significant enough to let you afford not to spend effort cutting hosting costs. I've opted for cloud hosting many places for that reason myself as well. In fact, my current job involves a 100% cloud based setup, and it's a fine choice in this instance because we do have the margins for it.
At the same time, many other places I've worked or done consulting that is not a choice their businesses can survive. One place the cost difference between cloud and managed servers was large enough it'd have been several times their profit.
We're not talking "marginally cheaper". It's rare to be talking about cost savings lover than 50%. That still doesn't mean it's always worth switching away from cloud environments - if that 50% saving is small enough to you to not matter, that's totally valid.
But you ought to understand that you're making that choice because the costs are currently too insignificant to be worth it, not because it's the cheapest option.
The argument is not that you should never pick cloud, but that claiming to choose cloud because the alternatives are "untenable from a financial point of view" to quote part of the comment that I first replied to is totally backwards and suggests to me nobody has actually done a cost analysis.
There are lots of advantages and disadvantages to hosting in a "cloud" environment, so I'm not trying to paint it as rainbows and ponies.
If a company has a short runway (ie. not a lot of cash in the bank) however, hosting in the cloud means essentially renting capacity for which you do not need to maintain. Sounds good to me.
It's a fun pendulum to watch swing though, I'll admit. Some companies, with small runways, host in the cloud because it's rented capacity without too much administration. They may grow wildly, when they notice they are paying the "cloud tax" and could considerably save money by hosting themselves. They grow some more, see how much money and attention they need to put into infrastructure and how slow it is for their business to increase capacity. In order to keep up with growth and maintain focus on their core business, they move to the cloud.
"Don't want to manage their own" has for so long been a valid excuse but cloud costs haven't been going down for so long - in many cases prices have increased - and hardware keeps getting more badass. In so many cases it's fear speaking.
A decent sized server will host a hugely capable instance that you may not have to think about for years. The scoffing down at DIY has made sense to some degree, but it just works brilliantly keeps getting to be a stronger & stronger case & most just assume reality can't actually work that well, that it'll be bad, and those folks won't always be right.
Why do you think that is? Hosts push cloud as it furthers their bottom line.
Cloud is popular because it is cheap. For consumers and providers. If you know exactly the resources you'll need and have infrastructure in place to scale then sure, VPS/cloud hosting might be good if you're looking to cut costs.
In the end though, you'll always be sharing and limited. If you're approve dynamic allocation then you'll just be paying for it at a premium.
I think you'll find this to be pretty rare. Cloud hosting is pretty cheap and easy, which is why so many people are using it. There isn't much of a reason to run your own hardware, especially in the early stages of a startup.
Pro: lots of people seem to think it is the only way
Con: lots of people seem to think it is the only way
Fact of the matter: running cloud infrastructures is as complicated, if not more complicated, than simply creating and hosting your own data center. The propaganda is thiiiick and those being told the cloud is not the only solution literally melt down when proven wrong. I've created server clusters, co-lo'ed them and maintained them through years, and ddos attacks and more - and I just figured it out, probably just like anyone working in the cloud. But, and this is a HUGE BUT, the monthoto-month expence of owning a cluster is merely the co-lo cabinet, for me that was $600 for a full cabinet. This is in contrast to the same setup at AWS is $96K per month. No brainer if you ask me.
A lot of its the buzz. 'Cloud Hosting' is something everyone thinks they need, despite not grasping why, or that the chances are they arent getting cloud hosting at all, just a VPS.
A solid dedicated server is 99% of the time far more useful than a crippled VPS on shared hardware but it obviously comes at an increased cost if you dont need all the resources they provide.
It's not difficult to come up with a specific set of requirements that make 3rd party hosting suboptimal or even impossible. We have customers who do not want their data to leave their data centers, so we must oblige.
For many situations, services like AWS are a god send. Resources that were typically allocated to infrastructure can now be reallocated to other areas. With a little bit of common sense hopefully areas that drive real business value.
Cloud isn't appropriate for all situations, but I assert that for many, it is, and "investing in IT" isn't a default directive.
Cloud should be a backup, a failover, but people build their entire business on other people's hardware because they can sell the cost per hour easier than the price of a new server which is cheaper in the long run. At this point, with so many outages showing the need for self-hosting, not allowing customers to do so shows how little you care about them.
If you're actually using the features of cloud - i.e. managed services - then this involves building out an IT department with skills that many companies just don't have. And the cost of that will easily negate or exceed any savings, in many cases.
That's a big reason that the choice of cloud became such a no brainer for companies.
We ended up hosting ourselves for a couple reasons:
- We found it pretty necessary to control our network end-to-end in order to manage uptime properly, as well as protect against attacks.
- We see pretty significant economies of scale in terms of purchasing our own machines vs. renting someone else's. Our infrastructure is lean and mean and not super processor-intensive, so we don't have huge spikes up and down (they generally just go up and stay there).
- We get to do cool stuff like IP anycasting and datacenter failover, which just wouldn't be possible if we were hosted in the cloud.
Long story short, it ends up we had the knowledge and expertise to build our own "cloud" and do so cost-effectively.
These are personal opinions, not fully factual, I've only worked with 2 cloud based start ups (neither full time).
Cloud services are barely a convenience to the customers/business that run on them. For a start up buying 50-100k in servers starting off is shocking but in most cases high usage cloud computing for hosting/databases will add up to that quickly.
The only thing 'cloud' actually does for its customer is prevent them from actually buying computers and renting rack space. Which isn't 'that' expensive (20k or so for a base line server), and 150 a month in rack rent.
Cloud lowers the bar of entry, but once you've entered staying with cloud isn't optimal.
And I think in most cases companies want to focus their employees and efforts on their core business, and if that doesn't include setting up and maintaining hardware in the long-term, then you don't build, you buy.
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