Don't build private clouds
Am I missing something here?<p>Is your point that everyone should move to the public cloud because you think it&#x27;s &quot;difficult&quot; to build a &quot;private&quot; one?<p>Sorry to be blunt, but are you joking, an idiot or just completely unaware of the reality our industry outside of startup land?<p>Forgetting the compliance reasons, or that I have zero confidence that a combination of giant American corporations have any interest in protecting my data and that of my users, forgetting also that the performance differences are incredibly significant (take 8 15k sas&#x27;s in raid 10 vs.. what? EBS with 2k &#x27;provisioned IOPS&#x27; on a shared san over iscsi?), the cost savings are much more significant than you claim here.<p>I recently bought a half rack load of dell boxes which have like 380GB of ram each and 52 threads, and they cost around £4k each.<p>Even with a whole army of overpriced ops dudes to install openstack or kubernetes on all that, the cost we spent would be spanked in a month on AWS for similar capacity, and mine isn&#x27;t a recurring one.<p>Why does it have to be so black and white for you folks?<p>A &quot;private cloud&quot; is absolutely the correct choice for a lot of people. If I were you I&#x27;d quietly delete that post, because I&#x27;ve absolutely judged you -- and probably unfairly -- on the content. On that, I wouldn&#x27;t hire you.<p>Listen, both these things have a place, but they&#x27;re NOT competing in the minds of those of us running serious infra. AWS allows us to prototype apps rapidly, to put project work on a credit card associated with a specific project budget instead of spending the shared budget, and for sure there are some nice services which do a bit of heavy lifting for us which helps speed that up.<p>After that phase though, very, very few people things actually need or make sense to stay there once it becomes a real product. Your scaling concerns are not being well served by 1000s of ec2 instances. Moving back in house is usually the smarter option.<p>If you&#x27;re pumping loads of data into the internet, then you should be behind a CDN and the origin shouldn&#x27;t be smashed to the point where you&#x27;re dependent on throwing compute into the void to cope. Akamai or CloudFlare are cheaper than deploying 100s of ec2&#x27;s because some shitty code can&#x27;t handle your traffic.<p>If data is coming in, read a book on queues; you&#x27;d be pretty surprised what you can do with even two 1U boxes and a good software architecture. We could handle 100k+&#x2F;sec of messages back in the java 1.5 and activemq days with 1U sparc boxes; how much do you recon it costs to do that today in AWS?<p>tl;dr - urgh. lets&#x27; talk in 10 years.<p>&lt;&#x2F;rant&gt;