[$] The true costs of hosting in the cloud

Should we host in the cloud or on our own servers? This question wasat the center of Dmytro Dyachuk's talk, givenduring KubeCon + CloudNativeCon last November. While many servicessimply launch in the cloud without the organizations behind themconsidering other options, large content-hosting services have actually moved back to their own data centers: Dropboxmigrated in 2016 and Instagramin 2014. Because such transitions can be expensive and risky, understanding the economics of hosting is a critical partof launching a new service. Actual hosting costs are oftenmisunderstood, or secret, so it is sometimes difficult to get thenumbers right. In this article, we'll use Dyachuk's talk to try toanswer the "million dollar question": "buy or rent?"