Comments on: Send this article to your friend who still thinks the cloud is a good idea

By: Piotr

Piotr — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 10:32:44 +0000

Thanks a lot for this article.

My few cents: one of the things that I like with running your app on your own machines is that in the worst case scenario, when you’ll make a mistake, a bug, and your app starts to consume 100% CPU and RAM – it will be localized to your servers only.

Compare it to big cloud providers where you pay-as-you-go without the means to put a real hard-cap for your expenses. None of them provide you with that, saying either it’s impossible or “you don’t want to turn your customers down because you hit some peak in popularity, right?”.

So, you create all those auto-scaling solutions that will add new machines, configure them on some LoadBalancer to deal with higher memory and CPU consumption.

By the time you realize there was some bug in your app you could already see that you just added a thousands of dollars to your bill.

They might cancel your bill after you’ll reach them.
Or they might not.
One more dependency on a good will of a cloud provider.

You don’t have any such concerns while running it on your own servers.

By: John

John — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 14:36:39 +0000

I’ve been in the industry and worked extensively in both worlds, the world before the cloud and the world after the cloud. I work for a major cloud provider. I agree with your assessment that some people are too dogmatic one way or the other. My belief is that there’s a future where connectivity is so good that you run what is economical to run in the cloud in the cloud and run what is economical to run in a self-managed setup in a self-managed setup. The premise of using cloud services is where you can derive value from removing undifferentiated heavy lifting. Back in the old days I used to run my own DNS servers and my own e-mail servers. Nobody does that anymore. And your write-up here completely ignores the fact that cloud object storage is a good deal, and I’d be surprised if you’re not using it yourself for backups. What you’re really talking about here is that cloud compute and cloud managed database is expensive. But anyway – here’s a crack at a rational argument for you. If you’re a one person entrepreneur trying to incubate an idea, why would you waste time on configuring operating systems and software? I can deploy and test in the cloud and then tear it all down. Stand it back up when I need it. That’s what Terraform is for. I can’t terraform away 169 Euros per server. And if I have a good business idea then the ROI is going to dwarf my piddly startup cloud bill.

I agree with a lot of what you said here, because if you’re going to run servers for 730 hours per month, why not get as low as you can, it just makes financial sense. The tradeoffs can be done very simply in a spreadsheet.

By: wheresalice

wheresalice — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 08:42:34 +0000

It’s hard to argue that Cloudflare isn’t the cloud when it literally has cloud in its name. But otherwise yes, fully agree there’s little actual value from big cloud providers. The perceived value is because people have had bad experiences with poorly-managed on-premise infrastructure, and ironically that’s often because they weren’t given enough budget

By: Luke Cavanagh

Luke Cavanagh — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 00:13:24 +0000

Hetzner is very solid for a solid VPS hosting provider.

By: Iñigo

Iñigo — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 15:52:59 +0000

In reply to Agent Cyberis.

I worked for a telco company for more than 15 years and we always wondered *how* it was possible that AWS could charge you so much money for traffic.

Transit is actually *really* cheap.

Telcos will either charge you for line capacity, or for a direct peering connection a percentile 95 of the traffic you’re injecting.

AWS, Google, etc. charge you for byte transferred, which is much more.

It’s not just the hardware. Everything comes with an extremelly high price attached.

By: Agent Cyberis

Agent Cyberis — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 03:15:36 +0000

I celebrated 50 years in everything automated last July. Started writing Fortran on a teletype connected to a Univac over an acoustic modem. Most of my experience is building the hardware and software. Great experience. I’ve noticed lots of ebb and flow. Large centralized resources and dumb terminals at the edge, then distributed computing, then decentralized capability at the edge, and back. I’m glad companies are beginning to re-patriate their computing to on prem, or colo based hardware. The cloud might be fine to rapidly prototype something, but someone’s got to pay for those billion dollar, gigawatt datacenters and it isn’t AWS/GCP/Azure; it’s their cash cow customers. I never liked being milked. Besides, spinning up your own server(s) is cool.

By: rameerez

rameerez — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 00:25:31 +0000

In reply to Al. Thanks for reading and sharing your experience, Al! I enjoyed reading your comment.

By: Al

Al — Mon, 14 Oct 2024 09:54:11 +0000

I started out my career in a big on-prem company (80k+ servers with all the trimmings) as a sysadmin, then became a developer eventually moved companies and joined the cloud world. I’ve been through a few cloud (and multi cloud!) companies at this point as roles across devops to backend developer. And I do indeed currently have both devops and cloud in my title. I say this only to point out that I feel I have experience both on-prem and in-cloud, as both ops and dev.

My 2c in 2s; AWS / GCP is absurdly, almost comically expensive. Hosting your own servers is not hard. You don’t need to pay someone for it unless you really don’t want to and are feeling flush with cash. (You do you I guess).

Networking can be a bit more involved but assuming you just want to break your servers up between vlans (dmz / prod / dev / logging) or some such you should be fine. Cloudflare tunnels are an excellent option for ingress.

Storage is dirt cheap. Even if you want some fancy network storage NFS has you covered; it’s old and battle tested tech and is likely fine for 99% of companies.

Installing postgres and setting up replication to a secondary is not even a days work. Postgres on a big server can take insane punishment, the bigger problem is how derpy the queries are you’re throwing at it.

Hell even kubernetes baremetal isn’t too onerous, though it’s definitely more fiddly to configure.

A lot of features the cloud has I’ve seen either not used, or enabled for “compliance” and are not useful in practice. Everywhere has cloud cost programs to cut back on waste, there are so many companies now that make their own living feeding off this alone it’s crazy.

Sadly though a lot of devs, especially the younger ones, joined post-cloud and haven’t used anything but. I think there’s also an argument that not really understand how your code is run & deployed is a bad thing. The clouds advertise that “developers shouldn’t need to care how X works, how their code is deployed or where” but I disagree; this is a blatant lie. I’ve lost count of the number of projects I’ve seen fall over because something fundemental about the cloud / networking / deployment / ops wasn’t understood at the start.

Nice blog!