I strongly disagree. Datacenters are super cheap compared to EC2. (I'm not talking building your own: start by leasing space from existing datacenters). There are a surprising number of places where you can go and lease a rack or ten or a whole room and be up and running in a couple of months.
I make the case that colocating pays off at just about any scale, assuming you have $10k in the bank, have a use for at least 40 cores and are able to pay upfront to handle anticipated scale.
Hurricane Electric has prices online of $300/mo for a rack. On AWS, a single full c4 machine (36 threads) costs $1.591 per Hour x 24 x 30 = 1145/mo -- this is more than the cost of running a whole rack with 40 machines. Decent internet can be gotten for hundreds per month.
Ok, so how about buying your own machines? E5-2630 with 20 threads is $700 x 2 = $1400 + motherboard + disk + ssd brings it to several thousand, so it will pay off in at most 6 months, and we're not even talking bandwidth or storage costs. Depending on the application you could be looking at a payoff after 2-3 months.
Worried about installing or remote management? IPMI, iDRAC, etc included with basically every server make this a piece of cake.
The only good case for cloud are if you may suddenly scale 10x and can't predict it; don't have $10k in the bank; or don't have 1-2 months to order machines and sign a contract for rack space.
What you're missing in that comparison is an extra engineer (or two) who can deal with power needs, networks hardware config, firmware updates, plans for rolling hardware, stock of replacement drives, seamless base system updates, dealing with the platform (virt or containers) itself and other things that the managed cloud gives you included in price. Ah, and they need to be available on call. Hardware may be cheap - people aren't.
You need people to manage AWS instances too, ive never seen any evidence that it actually takes less people at scale.
Sure for a few instances, its likely to be true because there is a certain amount of fixed overhead for dedicated hardware, but it remains a relatively low constant, but in reality there isnt much difference in terms of labour between wrangling hundreds of AWS instances, and hundreds of servers, and the servers will be many times cheaper to run.
And yet Google Maps has on multiple occasions failed to recognize when a on-ramp to a major California Interstate was closed (even after the road work had been announced days in advance in huge street signs). I was forced to set my navigation to Avoid Highways for a bit to get it to consider an alternative.
And don't get me started on Germany. You don't stand a chance if you attempt to use Google Maps in Germany to navigate around construction (which is basically always happening somewhere)--at least that's how it was two years ago when going through country roads, despite the presence of well marked closure and detour signs.
My point is, these may be the "easiest" types of things to handle, but we have a long way to go on execution. Getting something to work in one locality (e.g. Arizona) is a far cry from making something work worldwide.
I think you misunderstood the OP's post. He is saying that the people have a right to access the internet as a utility,
regardless of the destination address, be it Netflix or Google. Just like I should have the right to choose which food I eat, be it milk, or as you suggest, candy or fast food.
Netflix in particular is indeed not a right, and in fact Netflix charges a monthly subscription that you may or may not be able to afford. But if I pay for Netflix, I should have a right to access it, or any service I want, via my "chosen" internet service provider.
Anyway I'm making this post because I think I have a better version of the milk analogy, so here goes...
The main problem with the milk analogy is how the transactions are done. I pay the grocery store a fee for access to walk in and out of the market with a certain weight of groceries per second. Separately I pay the milk provider for all-you-can-drink access to milk.
(Alternatively, you can imagine the grocery store is one of those stores in a mall that you have to walk through to get to the rest of the mall, but I'm forced to walk in and out through their front door).
In this analogy, the grocery store should have no right to limit the amount of milk I can carry through their market, while claiming to offer access to any food by weight.
It's not just about responsiveness. About half of the AMP pages I open on Safari on iOS literally do not scroll at all, instead scrolling the top bar with the fake URL on it, so as a user AMP is literally breaking the web.
I think the frustration here is seeing the decay of the open web and the rise of AOL-esque walled gardens in which your Facebooks and your Googles own the access methods, and every other third party is subordinate to them.
These guys at Google are abusing the web in order to prevent you from navigating away from google hosted content (I'm a technical user and it still took me way too long to find that menu in the corner), in much the same way that Facebook apps make it hard to escape their respective walled gardens.
I randomly had this cd across from my desk when I read this article, so I decided to pop it in and see if I could find anything. Did a dd | strings but so far can't find any of these tools, unless they are outside the data track.
Mine says "Rebel Assault PC-CDROM V1.7" so maybe there are different versions of the cd with and without the dev files.
I make the case that colocating pays off at just about any scale, assuming you have $10k in the bank, have a use for at least 40 cores and are able to pay upfront to handle anticipated scale.
Hurricane Electric has prices online of $300/mo for a rack. On AWS, a single full c4 machine (36 threads) costs $1.591 per Hour x 24 x 30 = 1145/mo -- this is more than the cost of running a whole rack with 40 machines. Decent internet can be gotten for hundreds per month.
Ok, so how about buying your own machines? E5-2630 with 20 threads is $700 x 2 = $1400 + motherboard + disk + ssd brings it to several thousand, so it will pay off in at most 6 months, and we're not even talking bandwidth or storage costs. Depending on the application you could be looking at a payoff after 2-3 months.
Worried about installing or remote management? IPMI, iDRAC, etc included with basically every server make this a piece of cake.
The only good case for cloud are if you may suddenly scale 10x and can't predict it; don't have $10k in the bank; or don't have 1-2 months to order machines and sign a contract for rack space.