A million-dollar engineering problem

I was curious about that myself. What's the best way to model the costs associated with maintenance overhead that comes with bare-metal, vs the savings from managing bare-metal servers using a service (like packet), co-locating your own hardware or running your own datacenter.

My gut feeling is that you have to get to an extraordinary size to realize any meaningful savings, but that's primarily based on Dropbox's migration off AWS (https://www.wired.com/2016/03/epic-story-dropboxs-exodus-ama...).

I'm pretty much that in my current job only with a salary. Here's why: I can make all the recommendations I want but change has to be driven by the will of the higher ups, often as high as C-level folks (CIO/CTO). So you pay me to make recommendations, not to actually save you the money, because the second part is largely out of my control.

Having said that, all the cost savings initiatives I've spearheaded are on my resume and LinkedIn profile and I take great satisfaction in optimizing those environments to save the client money.

That's a big giant "it depends."

It depends on what your service looks like: CPU intensive, Memory Intensive, Storage intensive? (In reality some unique mix).

You probably won't see a huge savings year one, as you'll be spinning up a lot of new things and have a fairly large CapEx expenditure. Now if your growth pattern is steady/predictable then you should be able to plan out your hardware buys or do a hybrid solution to handle traffic bursts.

One of the nice things about running your own hardware is that there are some costs that are easier to control. Don't need new hardware? Don't need to spend on new hardware for example.

You also have much more control over your environment so you are able to really optimize your code, and infrastructure so that you don't need to scale as large system wise.

But, back to the question on how to model it? You just gotta dig in, and make some educated guesses about performance,test and repeat.

Go do it!

I used that exact same model in Conversion Rate Optimization - get your conversion rate up, give me 30% of what we improve.

And built that into a 20+ person digital agency billing millions of dollars a year before being bought out.

Exactly how I did that and you can to:

(1) Wrote topical, detail rich posts similar to the parent here about problems I was solving in CRO for a handful of customers, never disclosing confidential customer info.

(2) Marketed those posts strategically. EG I wrote one about "Which trust symbol gives you the highest return on conversion rate." and then literally just bought Google Adwords of people searching for that question! StackOverflow and other forums also are great ways to market by answering questions (free + put your details in contact info) or running ad campaigns specifically on those topics ($5k+).

(3) Turned the best performing / most viewed posts into "pitches" for speaking gigs at materially similar conferences, most were accepted and I became an "authority".

Every post / conference / etc had a little "Want us to fix it for you? Full service, performance fee model." banner or mention.

Work poured in after that and we were lucky enough to be very choosy.

If you can SAVE large enterprises money and are willing to do it on a performance basis you've got a business.

These last two engineering blog posts[1] were great reads and they're doing good open source work. Not looking for a job but would love to meet the team if they host an event!

[1] https://segment.com/blog/ui-testing-with-nightmare/