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Tech's broken promises: Streaming is now just as expensive and confusing as cable. Ubers cost as much as taxis. And the cloud is no longer cheap.

https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-broken-promises-streaming-ride-hailing-cloud-computing-2023-8

Some tech is getting pricier and looking a lot like the older services it was supposed to beat. Namely video streaming, ride-hailing, and cloud computing.

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reverendz

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Cloud computing CAN be cheaper but it can also be way more expensive. It is not a panacea.

It’s cheaper for companies that have unpredictable traffic/capacity. It lets you scale up/down without having build out physically.

For businesses with steady, predictable traffic it can be far more expensive. You buy the servers, you own them. They can run for years.

Cloud can get pricey veeeery quickly.

GaveUp

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If it was cheaper large companies would not all have moved to cloud, especially since it costs a very large upfront cost to migrate all that over if you already have a full setup

Netflix used to have one of the best homegrown infrastructure and even they moved everything off to AWS

I've worked at a place that mostly just served videos and had 100M users (no idea what the DAU/MAU was). The AWS bill was ~800k a year

Just buying the land and building all the data centers across multiple continents would probably bankrupt the entire company, forget about building all that software and setting up the hardware and configs by themselves

It's only cheaper for tiny companies, but even then, no company ever has the goal of staying small

reverendz

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Hosting video is exactly elastic demand and a perfect use case for cloud computing. But not every business hosts video.

I’ve worked with companies that are moving at least some of their infrastructure back on premises.

https://www.infoworld.com/article/2336102/why-companies-are-leaving-the-cloud.html

There’s tons of good reasons to use IAAS, but there’s also a reason folks joke about the cost of aws.