alt Hacker NewsSlow VMs on overprovisioned cloud hosts which cost as much per month as a dedicated box per year have broken a generation of engineers.
You could host so much from your macbook. The average HN startup could be hosted on a $200 minipc from a closet for the first couple of years if not more - and I'm talking expensive here for the extra RAM you want to not restart every hour when you have a memory leak.
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Not only that, you have a pile of layers that could be advantageous in some situations but are an overkill in most.
I've seen Spark clusters being replaced by a single container using less than 1 CPU core and few 100s MB of RAM.
> so much from your macbook
At least on cloud I can actually have hundreds of GiBs of RAM. If I want this on my Macbook it's even more expensive than my cloud bill.
Raw compute wise, you're almost right (almost because real cloud hosts aren't overprovisioned, you get the full CPU/memory/disk reserved for you).
But you actually need more than compute. You might need a database, cache, message broker, scheduler, to send emails, and a million other things you can always DIY with FOSS software, but take time. If you have more money than time, get off the shelf services that provide those with guarantees and maintenance; if not, the DIY route is also great for learning.
I don't see how that's the root cause. ClickHouse and snowflake run on your so-called slow vms on overprovisioned cloud hosts and they're efficient as hell. It's all about your optimizations.
The real problem is the lack of understanding by most engineers the degree of overprovisioning they do for code that's simple and doing stupid things using an inefficient 4th order language on top of 5 different useless (imo) abstractions.