SSDs have become fast, except in the cloud

Buy a server

I don't like this answer.

When I look at cloud, I get to think "finally! No more hardware to manage. No OS to manage". It's the best thing about the cloud, provided your workload is amenable to PaaS. It's great because I don't have to manage Windows or IIS. Microsoft does that part for me and significantly cheaper than it would be to employ me to do that work.

There is tooling to provide the same PaaS interface though, so your cost doing those things amounts to running OS updates.

A cloud is just someone else's computer.

When you rent a bare metal server, you don't manage your hardware either. The failed parts are replaced for you. Unless you can't figure out what hardware configuration you need - which would be a really big red flag for your level of expertise.

And now you have to manage the cloud instead. Which turns out to be more hassle and with no overlap with the actual problem you are trying to solve.

So not only do you spend time on the wrong thing you don't even know how it works. And the providers goals are not aligned either as all they care about is locking you in.

How is that better?

> No more hardware to manage. No OS to manage

We must be using different clouds.

For some of the much higher-level services … maybe some semblance of that statement holds. But for VMs? Definitely not "no OS to manage" … the OS is usually on the customer. There might be OS-level agents from your cloud of choice that make certain operations easier … but I'm still on the hook for updates.

Even "No machine" is a stretch, though I've found this is much more dependent on cloud. AWS typically notices failures before I do, and by the time I notice something is up, the VM has been migrated to a new host and I'm none the wiser sans the reboot that cost. But other clouds I've been less lucky with: we've caught host failures well before the cloud provider, to an extent where I've wished there was a "vote of no confidence" API call I could make to say "give me new HW, and I personally think this HW is suss".

Even on higher level services like RDS, or S3, I've noticed failures prior to AWS … or even to the extent that I don't know that AWS would have noticed those failures unless we had opened the support ticket. (E.g., in the S3 case, even though we clearly reported the problem, and the problem was occurring on basically every request, we still had to provide example request IDs before they'd believe us. The service was basically in an outage as far as we could tell … though I think AWS ended up claiming it was "just us".)

That said, S3 in particular is still an excellent service, and I'd happily use it again. But cloud == 0 time on my part. It depends heavily on the cloud, and less heavily on the service how much time, and sometimes, it is still worthwhile.

A cloud is network and tools, less hardware. For example see this [1] Reddit thread discussing network in Hetzner. Any other bare-metal would have same challenges. Once you solve network security you have to deal with server access. People hired and fired, hardcoded SSH keys is a bad idea. Once you solve access you likely have AD, LDAP and SSO of some sort. Then backups, and automated test suite + periodical test recoveries. Then database and backups. Then secrets, does all members of your team know production db password? And so on and on.

Maybe TCO still favors bare-metal but you have to spend a lot of time on configuration.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/hetzner/comments/rjuzcs/securing_ne...

I'm baffled after you quoted 'no OS to manage' why you'd start discussing virtual machines.

That may be your experience, but not mine.

Yes, the cloud is _different_ to manage and has some of the same fundamentals to overcome such as security and networking, but lacks some of the very large pain points of managing an OS, like updates, ancillary local services, local accounts, and so on.

I'm not sure why you would state that it doesn't solve the problem I'm invested in -- namely operating websites. It is the perfect cloud workload.