back to article Civo CEO on free credits, egress fees, and hauling it all back on-prem

As Britain's competition regulator probes the behavior of the cloud giants, local supplier Civo wants to see an overhaul along the lines of the energy market where consumers or businesses can swap suppliers easily. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) confirmed in October it is to inspect the health of the public cloud …

  1. jmch Silver badge

    Cloud isn't just "somebody else's server"

    It would actually be great if things really worked that way - Say I have an on-prem application server and database server, and I want to scale my business in a way that I can't handle the compute and storage requirements myself. Ideally my cloud provider can take over operations as easily as imaging the VMs from my on-prem, loading them up on their cloud, which can continue operations and scale up (or down) as required, and I only pay for actual usage rather than having to build out my infrastructure to be able to handle the peak load (even if normal load is far below the potential peak).

    But that's not what happens - in reality the cloud providers are all promoting their own 'cloud-native' applications, which in many cases do take advantage of native features to give some benefits.... however I think that's only applicable to a few use cases, not universally. The benefits are mostly to the cloud providers since they are the ones with the knowledge of their native cloud, which is unique only to themselves, allowing them to create lock-in and rent-seeking. Many companies are spending tons on the cloud to little benefit, or else scaling back cloud spend but without the knowledge to do it properly are leaving themselves open to security vulnerabilities.

    If what one is looking for is scalability and reliability without having to manage the hardware and infrastructure, just outsource that part. 'Containerisation' is the correct path, you package your software in a standard container that can run anywhere, and then you are just renting other people's hardware and paying them to manage it. NOT changing your whole software layer to accommodate the standard being forced by the cloud owner.

    1. katrinab Silver badge
      Alert

      Re: Cloud isn't just "somebody else's server"

      A company I used to work for did image their on-prem vms and upload them to the cloud, then sacked their IT staff.

      One problem was that security of their on-prem server mostly relied on the receptionist stopping people from getting into the office and connecting a laptop to the LAN, so without that, they got ransomwared very quickly.

      Another problem was that 4 Broadwell Cores and 4GB of RAM was nowhere near sufficient to support 200 users.

      Needless to say, they no longer have enough business to support employing anything like 200 staff.

  2. avakum.zahov

    That CEO should look in the mirror first

    "A year will have gone by, and you [the customer] build all your tooling around their ecosystem, which is very proprietary. And then to try and get out of that later ... there's no open standards to move to another cloud provider."

    - Why on Earth would you build all your tooling around their ecosystem? Because it is easier, right, There are tools, which are Open-source and work with every Cloud provider. Prometheus/Grafana stack, CockroachDB, Yugabyte, PostgreSQL, etc, etc. But it is a lot easier to let somebody else to do the testing and the integration. Well, now you have to pay them. The biggest problem for most executives is that they do not listen to the right engineers who tell them not to go for the "easy wins"

    "And you also have all the high egress fees to get your data out as well, which is going to cost you money. So then you end up signing a spending commitment with them because you're locked in."

    - When it comes to egress, may be one has to understand the problem first before start complaining. When you run you own data-center you buy your own equipment, not only the UPS, rack and servers, but also routers and switches. When you go to the Cloud you pay for VM instances, K8s, storage and other services, but you never pay for the ingress or the internal traffic. So, if the egress fees are so outrageous, how about paying for every byte you use, anywhere, and pay a lot less for egress.

  3. M.V. Lipvig Silver badge

    Just like drug dealers

    Giving credits for free cloud service to new customers is no different than getting a free sack of meth enhanced pot from a drug dealer. First hit's free, because you'll pay through the nose going forward.

    I am glad that more and more businesses are realizing that running your business using someone else's resources is a bad idea. When their contracted responsibility for losing years of data starts with "Whoops" and ends with "Sorry about that" guess who will be out of a job because your business disappeared with a whirr and a clonk at the local cloud provider?

    1. RegGuy1
      Facepalm

      Re: Just like drug dealers

      Haha. What, it's going to cost you more in the long run? Who knew?

  4. Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

    no kidding...

    Cloud's not best for everything? No kidding. It's great for burstable loads, and at the low end it's great to be able to get. a low end cloud server VM for like $5-10 a month. But indeed, cloud providers are not selling their services at cost, Economies of scale mean up to a point cloud could save money (slicing up 96-core cpus and such has got to save) but past some point it'll cost less to run on prem. As said in the article latency is certainly better on prem, you’re not going to get the sub 1ms time you can get over ethernet or couple ms over wifi over any internet connection between your business and a cloud provider.

  5. Zippy´s Sausage Factory

    "The other thing," he says, "is the move to on-prem."

    So back to the 1980s all over again with minicomputers instead of timesharing on mainframes that someone else owns?

    And the cycle of reinvention starts again...

    1. Doogie Howser MD

      If you're willing to wait long enough, everything comes back into fashion eventually.

  6. Mr Dogshit

    I told you so

    "A few years back, everyone was in this cloud hype … now it's like: 'This is really expensive'."

    "I think people are now starting to think: 'Just put it in the cloud' is not the approach."

    Well what do you know, I was right all along. Stupid fad that the CEO read about in the in-flight magazine.

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