Comment by 8fingerlouie

Comment by 8fingerlouie 6 hours ago

If you have high volume traffic depending on time of month, ie finance around ultimo/primo, you might need to scale your performance to 5-10x your normal idle load.

If running on your own data center, or renting physical/virtual machines from ie Hetzner, you will pay for that capability overhead for 30.5 days per month, when in reality you only need it for 2-3 days.

With the cloud you can simply scale dynamically, and while you end up paying more for the capacity, you only pay when you use it, meaning you save money for most of the month.

sundache 4 hours ago

> If running on your own data center, or renting physical/virtual machines from ie Hetzner, you will pay for that capability overhead for 30.5 days per month, when in reality you only need it for 2-3 days.

I keep seeing this take on here and it just shows most people don't actually know what you can do off the cloud. Hertzner allows you to rent servers by the hour, so you can just do that and only pay for the 2-3 days you need them.

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zelphirkalt 2 hours ago

Also the GP take is kinda silly, because one pays 5-10x with the typical cloud providers in the first place, so it would be totally fine to pay that and already have it, if one is willing to spend that much.
More likely load will spread over time for most scenarios and the server will be ready to handle that with lower hardware specs.

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- 8fingerlouie an hour ago
  
  There's a reason i specifically mentioned finance, where the end and start of a month is a lot more busy than the middle of the month, as in factor 10+.
  People receive paychecks, pay bills, buy stuff, with holidays (christmas, x-mas, etc) being even busier.
  Load does not even out, and when you have 3 million customers or more, the load is not really insignificant. Nor can you just delay it, or rely on eventual consistency.
  
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  sundache 31 minutes ago
  
  But most hosting providers allow you to just rent a server for a day or a few hours, so it's not really an argument why you have to use the cloud.
  
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amrocha 6 hours ago

You can use the cloud to dynamically scale when needed while still running most of your own infra, best of both worlds.

Tricky networking though.

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sofixa 6 hours ago

> Tricky networking though.
And data storage/locality/consistency.

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- amrocha 5 hours ago
  
  Databases are rarely the bottleneck during access volume spikes in my experience. It’s really impressive how far some beefy servers and a read copy can take you.
  But if that is your bottleneck you should be upgrading your DB system regardless of whether you’re on cloud or bare metal.
  
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  8fingerlouie 42 minutes ago
  
  But if your one source of truth is a single huge database, maybe on a mainframe, as is often the case with finance, and eventual consistency is a huge no go, the mainframe can become a limit regardless when you're being "hammered" by 3+ million users all wanting to check their account balance.
  Yes, you can solve the problem with sharding and other tricks, but for many banks, the mainframe is still their main data storage, and it has 60+ years of legacy code on it that is not easily or quickly migrated to modern architecture.
  
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