Ask HN: Cloud providers are losing in favor of bare-metal?

Given that AWS, Azure and GCP are all recording 20-40% YoY growth, no, I don’t think they’re losing ground.

As for startup credits, they’re still handing out $100-200k like candy if they deem you a serious startup. There was a lot of abuse in the past so they started putting up filters.

Interesting that you call hetzner “bare metal”. Most of their product offerings are cloud based VMs (and certainly for $20 a month you are getting shared hardware VMs). Do you think more devs are are actually buying hardware/servers or do you just mean devs are using VMs provided by smaller companies instead of the hyper scalers, when you say “bare metal”.

I don’t think so. Hetzner sees some growth but they are still very small.

DB can have replicas and upload dumps to some S3 compatible object stores. Like in the cloud. CI/CD with stuff like gitlab and Argo CD is mostly the same. You can install some log monitoring stuff like the classic Elk stack. Or be old fashioned and use ssh and journalctl.

I wouldn’t attempt to automatically scale to the moon on bare metal, that won’t happen. But a few beefy servers running k3s or similar can get you pretty far.

I would say it depends on the effort to cost savings ratio. I moved my most expensive servers there because that’s where it made the most sense. If it totals considerable amounts of money it is absolutely worth the extra effort, but it is not worth it if you only have a handful of t4g.mediums.

It's just the meme of the year. There's nothing that changed really for quite a long time. Some cloud services provide things on a simplistic and easy way, some in complex and complete ecosystem. The same choice and the tradeoffs have always been there.

The only change is that it's popular to write a "how we saved $$$" blog posts. Which actually could be read as "how we failed to do proper analysis and kept losing $$$ for years".

This would be quite funny since _I’ve been using bare metal the whole time_. But I don’t think it’s as simple as that.

If you are using either Amplify or Vercel, you’re a really small developer that isn’t moving the needle.

dhh spent 3 years moving from AWS to bare mental to save $2M and in the process completely missed the AI wave. Opportunity cost is real.

Cloud is not losing ground but also Cloud computing is also not suitable for every business problem. Its killer feature for businesses with fluctuating usage profiles and "busy" seasons. Think like a tax related application for businesses, in the US, they have to file quarterly and annual. There are probably busy seasons where there would likely be more activity so a cloud compute environment where you can scale up to handle the load with a couple commands is ideal and then scale it down (and lower your costs) during slow times.

Indie hackers and small < 10 people startups don't need cloud. However its easier to get moving and scale up and you can just tie in all sorts of other services to make your life easier. If you're on-prem or managing VMs you need to figure out a lot of infrastructure things, networking, security, logging, failover, etc.

Then there is transferring risk. If you host your own infrastructure and you have an outage unrelated to HW or data center, that is entirely on you and to be honest will probably happen more frequently than using cloud. When your cloud provider is down, if its a household name, everyone already knows because everything else they use is probably having issues too. Much easier explanation to customers, they likely won't leave over a cloud outage.

yes and no

definitely seeing the weaknesses of cloud these days -- it is not a one-stop solution, and the costs are often comically, terribly, absurdly high

otoh, i'm in some regulated industries and being able to get out of dealing with unions and into a regulated-approved cloud situation is very useful for many things.

it's a true hybrid model and it's a challenge, but that challenge is often far, far cheaper than a pure cloud model, and pure cloud is not exactly uncomplicated.

plus like 2/3 of what we do does not need complicated CI/CD pipelines -- most business tasks don't.

Going by financials alone, no, public cloud providers aren’t remotely losing ground. That being said, organizations being run in rational and objective manners (instead of chasing buzzwords and fads) are increasingly looking at “right-sizing” their technology estates and moving them to more rational places, depending on workloads or other needs.

Public cloud, like all technologies, is little more than a tool. You don’t have to use it at all if you don’t want to, and even if you use it all the time for everything (as many customers do), you’re free to re-evaluate your use cases and migrate accordingly (depending on the services you consume).

With rising discussions about Big Tech monopolies, shifting geopolitical tensions, an increased focus on sovereignty, and a swath of economic factors that incentivize tighter budgets, the expectation is that workload migration and reshoring will continue to be an important topic for stakeholders well into the 2030s. Whether that means moving on-prem entirely for stable/non-scaling workloads, moving to a regional VPS for compliance, or changing CSPs entirely to avoid adversaries, the reality is that this discourse isn’t going away.

> Do you think the cloud is actually losing ground?

No. What you are reading is just few snowflakes here and there, but there's no snow storm. Will that change? Hard to say. I have not seen any information that would throw shade on cloud for new projects to avoid it. So definitely no changes in this decade.

I’ve found the combination of Netcup (either tier of offering has been wonderful ) combined with Cloudron gives me the best of both worlds. A marketplace one click app deployment and resources I can scale up or down as needed.

I’m building a business around that offering (turnkey VPS + Cloudron + Backblaze) as I think that gives everyone “cloud” but sovereign. For $250.00 a month.

No, not yet, but People are starting to get the cold shower treatment they needed. Cloud services make sense for two groups of companies:

1. Huge multi-billion dollar corporations where the overhead of hiring 1000 hardware engineers to manage the... hardware is not worth the trouble/effort.

2. Fresh, 2.5 people-involved startups that need to ship a product asap and cannot afford to waste their time on infrastructure.

Everyone in-between however - bare-metal, be it rented, bought second hand and shoved in a collocation datacenter - it makes a lot more sense. For the money you'd spend on AWS/Azure/GCP in a year, in most cases you can get the equivalent refurbished servers you'd need, set them up and toss them in a datacenter, where you get full control over your own data and infrastructure and probably be left with cash to spare - the cold shower I was referring to.