The Cloud and the Dripping Dagger

In the world of cloud providers and cloud hosting today, we have some behemoths and market leaders that are the "obvious" choices. Namely, AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Oracle. In my experience, there is two main problems when going to the public cloud. The problems are simply defined:

• Cost
• Complexity

And if I were to throw in my opinion on the matter, a third problem would be centralization. But lets focus on the first two.

The cost and complexity has me literally dumbfounded every so often, in disbelief that companies around the world are falling head, shoulders, knees, and toes, into public cloud. Let me explain...

Cost

My point about cost goes way back to the age old argument about ownership. The "pursuit of happiness." Someone could either own their hosting servers, or they could lease them from a provider.

Now, I understand that not everyone is going to be a server guru like I've been for the last years of my life. Not everyone wants to run a FreeBSD server with ZFS and jails. Not everyone wants to run an OpenBSD pf firewall. Not everyone understands Linux containerization. And I could go on. And that is totally fine if you don't understand it. That is what people like me and other DevOps type people are for.

So what am I saying?

I am saying, be considerate of your costs. Some cloud providers are going to charge an arm and a leg to allow you through the door to their services. Some will not.

If you cannot own your servers, then at least be aware of your subscription costs, and what you are subscribing to. It is not uncommon for a company to have cloud resources that they don't exactly know what they are for, or what they are hosting, or what data they have on them, and then they pay every month for the privilege of keeping the mysterious resource around.

Do. Not. Be. That. Company. If you need help, just give me a call.

I typically recommend these companies:

• Vultr
• Digital Ocean
• Or just hire me :-)

Or, if you want to go all-in, just buy your own stuff! We can help with self-hosted and on-premise servers as well.

Complexity

This is the other killer. A typical AWS account will have one or more of the following resources:

• EC2's
• VPC's
• Subnets
• Load Balancers
• RDS's
• Container registries, container runtimes
• Route53 for DNS
• CDN / Cloudfront
• Security Groups

You don't need all those things, and many accounts won't, but some will, and others will use more. But the point is, things can start getting complex.

A few years ago I came up with this theory, and it goes like this: it takes as much staff to manage actual hardware as it does to manage a cloud deployment. I am sticking to that assessment. Public cloud is complicated. There is lots of intricacies. Running your own hardware is not as bad as people make it sound.

But keep one thing in mind; listen to this concept, freedom is inseparably tied to responsibility. If you are responsible with your own hardware, meaning you get backup drives, and you mirror your filesystem, and you backup your data, etc, then you can be free of these subscription and complexity costs from the public cloud. That is what I am aiming to do with this company, by providing that service to you guys. In the end, with our service, the little guy wins.

Here is another lesson from this: the cost feeds the complexity, and the complexity feeds the cost. The more you pay, the more it needs to do. The more it does, the more you need to pay.

This is why I recommend using Vultr or Digital Ocean. They are both much more straightforward to use.

The Dagger

What is the dripping dagger of cloud hosting? Simple: cost and complexity. My argument is that this dagger does not need to be dripping with the evidence of its crime when it comes to small business. I think that in most cases, the big players in public cloud are not necessary.

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