Duncan Hutty <[email protected]> writes: > For those who don't know Hacker News, it's a news aggregator site where > as much of the value is in the comments as in the news postings. Its > community is strongly focussed on the tech entrepeneur.
> This particular discussion is about the direction of systems > administration, particularly in the context of SaaS, PaaS that is so > popular amongst these tech startup types: > > http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2137494 Yes, well, for me this was a reminder of how dumb I probably sound when I talk about web design and the future of web applications, things I really only know peripherally. The thing about "the cloud" and usually, outsourced infrastructure in general, is that "the first hit is free" - It's an incredibly cheap way to start, but it gets expensive fast as you scale. This is why as I'm trying to grow into serving slightly larger customers, instead of offering larger VPSs, I'm offering co-lo; if you only need a gig or two of ram, there's no way you can host your own hardware for cheaper than I can. But if you need 128GiB ram? Then owning (some of) your own stuff starts to look a lot better. I know one startup who is in to AppEngine for a few grand a month at a scale I believe that I could comfortably handle with one of my $2000 32GiB ram 8 core quad spindle servers. I mean, for some uses, "the cloud" really can't be beat. It's beautiful, for instance, for keeping a warm off-site backup in case your primary datacenter gets nuked, and there are others, of course, too. But, lately the trend has been to put /everything/ in the cloud (in part driven by startups who started with everything in the cloud; which makes a whole lot of sense when you are small continuing to use the cloud as they grow.) and I think this trend is going to start to see something of a backlash, as prices for actual hardware continue to fall radically faster than prices for "cloud-hosted" hardware fall. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
