[jgb1984]

You're falling into the false dichotomy that always comes up with these topics: as if the choice is between the cloud and renting rack space while applying your own thermal paste on the CPUs. In reality, for most people, renting dedicated servers is the goldilocks solution (not colocation with your own hardware). You get an incredible amount of power for a very reasonable price, but you don't need to drive to a datacenter to swap out a faulty PSU, the on site engineers take care of that for you. I ordered an extra server today from Hetzner. It was available 90 seconds afterwards. Using their installer I had Ubuntu 24.04 LTS up and running, and with some Ansible playbooks to finish configuration, all in all from the moment of ordering to fully operational was about 10 minutes tops. If I no longer need the server I just cancel it, the billing is per hour these days.

Bang for the buck is unmatched, and none of the endless layers of cloud abstraction getting in the way. A fixed price, predictable, unlimited bandwidth, blazing fast performance. Just you and the server, as it's meant to be. I find it a blissful way to work.

[le-mark]

I’d add this. Servers used to be viewed as pets; the system admins spent a lot time on snow flake configurations and managing each one. When we started standing up tens of servers to host the nodes of our app (early 2000s); the simple admin overhead was huge. One thing I have not seen mentioned here was how powerful ansible and similar tools were at simplifying server management. Iirc being able to provision and standup servers simply with known configurations was a huge win aws provided.

[zejn]

Also, it was a very very different landscape.

You were commonly given a network uplink and a list of public IP addresses you were to set up on your box or boxes. IPMI/BMC were not a given on a server so if you broke it, you needed to have remote hands and probably brains too.

Virtualisation was in the early days and most of the services were co-hosted on the server.

Software defined networks and Open vSwitch were also not a thing back then. There were switches with support for VLANs and you might have had a private network to link together frontend and backend boxes.

Servers today can be configured remotely. They have their own management interfaces so you can access the console and install OS remotely. The network switches can be reconfigured on the fly, making the network topology reconfigurable online. Even storage can be mapped via SAN. The only hands on issue is hardware malfunction.

If I was to compare with today, it was like having a wardrobe of Raspberry Pies on a dumb switch, plugging in cables when changes were needed.

[BirAdam]

Even if you don't go ansible/chef/puppet/salt, just having git is good. You can put your configs in git, use a git action to change whatever variables, and deploy to the target. No extra tools needed, and you get versioned configs.

[lelanthran]

> all in all from the moment of ordering to fully operational was about 10 minutes tops.

I think this is an important point. It's quick.

When cloud got popular, doing what you did could take upwards of 3 months in an organisation, with some being closer to 8 months. The organisational bureaucracy meant that any asset purchase was a long procedure.

So, yeah, the choices were:

1. Wait 6 months to spend out of capex budget

Or

2. Use the opex budget and get something in 10m.

We are no longer in that phase, so cloud services makes very little sense now because you can still use the opex budget to get a VPS and have in going in minutes with automation.

[mattstainton001]

True, but I think you're touching on something important regarding value. Value is different depending on the consumer: for you, you're willing and able to manage more of the infrastructure than someone who has a more narrow skillset. Being able to move the responsibility for areas of the service on to the provider is what we're paying for, and for some, paying more money to offload more of the responsibility actually results in more value for the organization/consumer

[alphager]

> I ordered an extra server today from Hetzner. It was available 90 seconds afterwards.

Back when AWS was starting, this would have taken 1-3 days.