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
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2020
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2021
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2022
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2023
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2024
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2025
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2026
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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.