People praise the cloud as carefree, with managed services easing every pain.
I say clouds are pig-butchering schemes, hundredfold markups with smug disdain.
Cyber landlords hold monopolies, hike the price, extract your vein.
They outsource ops, freeload on OSS, rent you servers, rebrand the game.
Everyone rushes to the cloud, burning cash like pouring rain.
Sky-high rentals can’t be borne; self-hosted OSS is still the sane.
Downcloud pioneers clear the way, shouldering doubt and market strain.
They see through fog to mountain tops because they walk the edge in pain.
“Cloud-first” became dogma; many developers only see through that lens. These essays use data and firsthand experience to explain both the value and the traps of public-cloud rentals—practical references in this era of “do more with less.”
Downcloud Case Studies#
- DHH: Leaving the cloud saved us an extra $100M
- Downcloud Odyssey: Is it time to leave the cloud?
- Don’t worship complexity—self-hosting can stay stable
- Six months, a million saved: DHH’s downcloud FAQ
- Ahrefs saves $400M by staying off cloud
- A sloppy show: Alibaba-Cloud RDS meltdown
- Paying to suffer: Escaping the Myawaddy of cloud
When Things Explode#
- Lessons from Alibaba-Cloud’s epic outage
- Tencent Cloud: clown car with no face left
- Dark forest: nuke an AWS bill with just an S3 bucket name
- No-equals delete: Google Cloud wiped a fund’s entire account
- Global Windows bluescreen: both sides were clown brigades
Core Resources#
- Real cost of cloud compute
- Object storage: from discounts to pig butchering
- Is cloud storage a pig-butchering scam?
- Is a cloud database just a tax on IQ?
- Garbage Tencent Cloud CDN: from hello world to rage quit
- Alibaba DCDN: 32 seconds, ¥1,600 bill
Business Models#
- Will DBAs be replaced by the cloud?
- FinOps ends with leaving the cloud
- Why haven’t domestic clouds dug up “sand money” yet?
- Are cloud SLAs comfort blankets?
- Paradigm shift: from cloud-first to local-first
RDS Critiques#
- Are cloud databases pig-butchering schemes?
- Myth of HA/DR
- Cloud RDS amputated PostgreSQL’s soul
- Cloud RDS: from dropping tables to skipping town
- Rebuttal: “Why you shouldn’t hire DBAs (again)”
Satire & Portraits#
- Sexologists, chemists, and software BS artists
- Toothpaste cloud? Stop praising vendors
- Internet tech master crash course
- Clown crews behind Internet outages
- How cloud vendors see customers: broke, bored, needy
Business Commentary#
- Alibaba-Cloud’s price cuts reek of desperation
- How state-owned IT views commercial clouds
- Alibaba-Cloud stuck outside the door
- What do cloud vendors actually sell?
- Are Tencent/Ali really doing “cloud computing”?
Case feeds (excerpt)#
Downcloud Diary and vendor-specific timelines follow—Alibaba, Tencent, Cloudflare, Google, Microsoft, OCI, etc. See the original Chinese links for the full list of incident and analysis posts.
