Cloud computing – where’s the silver lining?

Cloud Computing - where's the silver lining?

I’ve seen several people propounding the cost savings of cloud computing as being of great benefit to startups. Most recently someone wrote “… cloud offers an amazing opportunity to reduce costs for startups”

This simply isn’t true.

It cost ~$2500 to buy a smoking hot server from Silicon Mechanics with SSD drives and under $100/month to host it at a reputable data center. Over 4 years that’s about $160/month which is less than coffee and a doughnut each day. Even if the cloud was free that still wouldn’t make it an “amazing” cost saving.

In addition, said smoking hot server, can outperform 8 large EC2 instances on any compute heavy or data intensive operation. For individual web requests with some database access it also offers lower latencies = better customer experience.

Depending on the load, cloud computing can cost more than a dedicated server and offer a worse customer experience. It’s not the panacea it’s made out to be.

The ‘correct’ reasons to select cloud computing are …

• it offloads a bunch of setup and maintenance effort to someone else,
• you can get another ‘machine’ more quickly / more easily,
• it allows you to scale up a [well-designed] application easily if your startup is successful and actually needs to go beyond one server, …

“Cost savings” doesn’t even make the list for startups IMHO and many of these same benefits can be had by running your own smoking hot server with virtualization.

The other dirty secret of cloud computing concerns the notion that you can pull together a reliable system from disparate services from different vendors.  Do the math: 0.999 x 0.999 x 0.999 x 0.999 is a lot less than 0.999 and that could mean unacceptable downtime for your users.

Summary: It’s not significantly cheaper, it may be slower, it may be less reliable but it can be much more convenient.

photo credit: dktrpepr