What do you think about the "cloudification" of mobile?

Thu Jan 27 07:32:06 UTC 2022

On Thu, 27 Jan 2022 at 09:16, Mark Tinka <mark at tinka.africa> wrote:

> > Saving 12 months of opex $ sounds great, except when you lose 18
> > months of opex $ in 2 days completely outside of your ability to control.
>
> I don't disagree.
>
> What this does, though, is democratize access into the industry. For a
> simple business model that is serving a small community with a handful
> of eyeballs, not trying to grow forever but put food on the table, it's
> somewhere to start.

I do disagree, if I understood the argument right. If the argument is
'cloud makes no business sense to anyone'.

Doing the 1st server properly costs several million euros a year,
since you need competent 24/7 staffing, with sick leaves, holidays (in
1st world countries where this is a thing) and attrition taken into
account. Staff who can do infra, compute, storage, networking (that's
4 separate teams usually, each needing overhead for 24/7) who are
comfortable with working nights.

This argument 'no one should be using x, x is a fad' happens when
every new technology appears, literally people object to using paper
and pen, as it's too convenient for writing thereby causing quality of
writing to decrease compared to stone tablets. Followed by the
evilness of books, newspapers, radio, tv, internet and so forth.
And always these fringe opinions that something is outright bad/good
gives away to more nuanced views.

I wonder if these people who object to using the cloud, object to
using 3rd party data centres outright? Or accept that you don't have
to build the physical premises where you put the compute, or do you
have to own that too? If you don't have to own that, why not? Since it
would seem a difficult position to at same time argue you can't use
cloud because of lack of control, but you can use 3rd party data
centres, now you're still lacking control on many types of outages.

If we need to own everything, where does it end? What can we get from
3rd parties? NAND gate? Or can we at least assume we don't have to
build hydrogen atoms? That we get hydrogen atoms from elsewhere and
start from that? Why is it that always the objection is something
contemporary but the rest of the stack is fine to be provided by a 3rd
party? If you believe you're living in a special period of time, where
there is fundamental change to this, your position is statistically
weak.

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  ++ytti