Cloud infrastructure has become an automatic choice for many companies. Especially services like S3, which offer object-based storage, are favored for their quick start and flexibility. However, as scale grows, these advantages are often replaced by unpredictable costs and loss of control.

In this article, we explore why businesses should consider modern and open-source alternatives like Rook-Ceph—supported by practical examples, technical insights, and operational realities.

The “Cloud Is Automatically Cheaper” Myth

Related discussion on Hacker News illustrates how teams often underestimate long-term cloud costs, especially as workloads scale.

Contrary to popular belief, cloud infrastructure isn’t always cheaper. As data volume grows, costs tend to rise not linearly but logarithmically. The most common cost drivers include:

• Data egress
• Hot storage usage
• IOPS and transfer units

Many organizations start with a low-cost prototype in the cloud, but lose control of costs once the product is in production.

Above: Rook-Ceph architecture in a Kubernetes environment. Thanks to the operator pattern, managing Ceph becomes significantly easier.

Data Egress: The Hidden Threat

While writing data to services like S3 may seem cheap, pulling that data out can be extremely costly. In some cases, egress charges can account for 40–60% of a company’s total cloud bill.

This becomes even more obvious in:

• Video, media, or AI inference pipelines
• Distributed microservice architectures
• Edge/IoT environments

In the cloud, every byte that leaves your system adds to your bill.

Missed Optimization Opportunities

The perception that “cloud is easy” often leads teams to skip fundamental infrastructure planning:

• Unnecessary replication
• Poor region selection
• Uncontrolled versioning
• No lifecycle policies

These oversights can lead to exponentially growing costs, even in small-scale systems.

With Rook-Ceph, all these variables are in your hands. You define the components and you control the costs.

Every Feature Has a Price

Cloud platforms offer many built-in services—but most of them don’t match your actual needs. For instance:

• Lifecycle management
• Intelligent tiering
• Cross-region replication

If you’re not actively using these features, you’re still paying for them. With Rook-Ceph, only the capabilities you need are enabled.

Cloud Is for the Big Guys—Not Necessarily the Rest

Large enterprises often negotiate private pricing deals with cloud providers, gaining substantial discounts. Small and medium-sized businesses usually pay full list price.

This undermines the economic sustainability of cloud for smaller organizations. Systems like Rook-Ceph give them back infrastructure control—at a fraction of the cost.

Geo-Replication: A Luxury in Cloud, Native in Ceph

Replicating data across multiple locations in the cloud can trigger major costs:

• Cross-region request charges
• Replication bandwidth
• Inter-region latency effects

Ceph supports geo-replication natively. You can connect multiple Ceph clusters using mirroring, virtually eliminating this cost.

Alternative Hosting: Colo, Hetzner, and Others

Running on-prem doesn’t mean hosting servers in your office. Today, providers like Hetzner offer:

• 10G networking
• Affordable storage
• High uptime SLAs

This makes it easy to run Rook-Ceph in hosted environments—bringing cloud-level comfort under your own terms.

Real-World Setup: A $100K S3 Alternative

In one of our deployments, we built a Rook-Ceph-based object/block/file storage system using:

• 8 refurbished Dell servers with 128 GB RAM each
• 8–14 JBOD disks per server
• 10G Ethernet network
• Total hardware cost: under $100,000
• Active geo-replication between two sites

This system has been live for over 2 years, serving applications via an S3-compatible API.

Operational Realities: Is Ceph Complex?

Yes. Ceph is powerful, but setup and maintenance require attention. However:

• With Rook, Ceph can be deployed with just a few Kubernetes manifests
• Integrated monitoring with Prometheus + Grafana + AlertManager is possible
• Disk failures, OSD recovery, and pool adjustments are all operator-driven

Today, you can even outsource full SLA-based management. So even without internal Ceph expertise, you can still benefit from its full power.

Final Word: Cloud Is a Tool, Not a Goal

loud platforms are amazing—but they’re not always the best choice. When control, cost predictability, and flexibility matter, solutions like Rook-Ceph let you define your own strategy.

And you can do it—not just technically, but in a financially sustainable way as well.

When done right, Rook-Ceph doesn’t just replace S3—it gives you back control over your data.

You don’t have to leave the cloud. But if you want to stay, now you have a real benchmark.