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Posted by Torq_boi 2 days ago

Don't rent the cloud, own instead(blog.comma.ai)
1180 points | 493 commentspage 7
nickorlow 2 days ago|
Even at the personal blog level, I'd argue it's worth it to run your own server (even if it's just an old PC in a closet). Gets you on the path to running a home lab.
drnick1 1 day ago|
Absolutely. I don't have a blog but run my own email, several game servers, Matrix instance, Nextcloud and other internal services on a retired gaming PC. The total cost of my cloud subscriptions is $0, and no one is snooping on me. It's a great setup when combined with Linux machines and GrapheneOS phones, completely private and free of Big Tech.
b8 1 day ago||
SSD's don't last longer than HDDs. Also they're much more expensive due to AI now. They should move to cutdown on power costs.
bradley13 1 day ago||
Goes for small business and individuals as well. Sure, there are times that cloud makes sense, but you can and should do a lot on your own hardware.
CodeCompost 2 days ago||
Microsoft made the TCO argument and won. Self-hosting is only an option if you can afford expensive SysOps/DevOps/WhateverWeAreCalledTheseDays to manage it.
davsti4 1 day ago|
So.... you're saying they must be understaffed and paying poverty range wages to afford the San Diego climate and still cut a profit? ;)
segmondy 2 days ago||
I cancelled my digital ocean server of almost a decade late last year and replaced it with a raspberry pi 3 that was doing nothing. We can do it, we should do it.
rmoriz 1 day ago||
Cloud, in terms of "other company's infrastructure" always implies losing the competence to select, source and operate hardware. Treating hardware as commodity will eventually treat your very own business as commodity: Someone can just copy your software/IP and ruin your business. Every durable business needs some kind of intellectual property and human skills that are not replaceable easily. This sounds binary, but isn't. You can build long-lasting partnerships. German Mittelstand did that over decades.
infecto 1 day ago||
I love this article. Great write up. Gave me the same feeling when I would read about Stackoverflows handful of servers that ran all of the sites.
jongjong 2 days ago||
Or better; write your software such that you can scale to tens of thousands of concurrent users on a single machine. This can really put the savings into perspective.
swiftcoder 2 days ago|
If you were to read TFA, it is about ML training workloads, not web servers
jongjong 2 days ago||
Well the article starts out with a suggestion that we should all get a data center... It's quite a jump to assume that everyone reading this article needs to train their own LLMs.
monster_truck 1 day ago||
Don't even have to go this far. Colocating in a couple regions will give you most of the logistical thrills at a fraction of the cost!
coffeebeqn 1 day ago|
Heavy ML workloads make this more worthwhile since you get to design it to squeeze value out of every facet. For a basic web server and database it’s definitely overkill and something like a colocation makes much more sense
langarus 2 days ago|
This is a great solution for a very specific type of team but I think most companies with consistent GPU workloads will still just rent dedicated servers and call it a day.
ocdtrekkie 2 days ago||
It's the opposite. The more consistent your workload the more practical and cost-effective it is to go on-prem.

Cloud excels for bursty or unpredictable workloads where quickly scaling up and down can save you money.

langarus 2 days ago||
Other benefits: easy access to reliable infrastructure and latest hardware which you can swap as you please. There are cases where it makes sense to navigate away from the big players (like dropbox going from aws to on-prem), but again you make this move when you want to optimize costs and are not worried about the trade-offs.
hyperbovine 2 days ago||
I agree, and cloud compute is poised to become even more commoditized in the coming years (gazillion new data centers + AI plateauing + efficiency gains, the writing is on the wall). There’s no way this makes sense for most companies.
NitpickLawyer 2 days ago||
> AI plateauing

Ummm is that plateauing with us in the room?

The advantage of renting vs. owning is that you can always get the latest gen, and that brings you newer capabilities (i.e. fp8, fp4, etc) and cheaper prices for current_gen-1. But betting on something plateauing when all the signs point towards the exact opposite is not one of the bets i'd make.

lelanthran 2 days ago||
> Ummm is that plateauing with us in the room?

Well, the capabilities have already plateaued as far as I can tell :-/

Over the next few yeas we can probably wring out some performance improvements, maybe some efficiency improvements.

A lot of the current AI users right now are businesses trying to on-sell AI (code reviewers/code generators, recipe apps, assistant apps, etc), and there's way too many of them in the supply/demand ratio, so you can expect maybe 90% of these companies to disappear in the next few years, taking the demand for capacity with them.

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