Cloud Skepticism Debate

The cluster discusses skepticism towards cloud computing's value, particularly its costs and hype, with arguments favoring on-premises infrastructure over providers like AWS, Azure, and GCP for most use cases.

📉 Falling 0.4x DevOps & Infrastructure
5,876
Comments
19
Years Active
5
Top Authors
#4608
Topic ID

Activity Over Time

2008
25
2009
81
2010
93
2011
146
2012
124
2013
121
2014
123
2015
133
2016
232
2017
253
2018
300
2019
404
2020
535
2021
597
2022
661
2023
798
2024
646
2025
576
2026
28

Keywords

VP S3 OK DC AWS REDUCE GCP RDBMS CTO F500 cloud cloud providers aws providers prem abstraction aws azure compute cloud provider cloud services

Sample Comments

computably Jun 4, 2025 View on HN

That sounds like "working as intended." The main selling points of the cloud are liquidity and accessibility. VC-backed startups are basically the target demographic.

blueflow Aug 26, 2024 View on HN

Implied in this: That the cloud provider can do it better than you. Not universally true nowadays.

as3413 Nov 17, 2025 View on HN

ngl the cloud evangelists aren’t gonna like this one. this is basically “we did the math and cloud wasn’t worth it

woooooo Oct 4, 2024 View on HN

Exception, companies like datadog where they're actually operating in several clouds for good business reasons (it's where their customers are).

throwaway2048 Sep 25, 2018 View on HN

why not cut out the middle man and just say those companies suck, and the cloud isn't going to fix it for you.

viraptor Nov 16, 2025 View on HN

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".

foxhop Dec 12, 2016 View on HN

Good luck. I think moving from cloud is a mistake. I hope your prove me wrong.

emodendroket Jun 7, 2018 View on HN

In a world where everyone's on AWS or Azure or Google Cloud Engine, hasn't the ship kind of sailed?

dekhn Apr 26, 2022 View on HN

no. that was a tabloid claim based on iffy data. Cloud's main products (compute, storage, databases, load balancers, etc) aren't going anywhere.

anothernewdude Oct 24, 2021 View on HN

That doesn't make much sense given their cloud offerings.