AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)

Of course AWS needs to make money.

Of course they make more money in the short term if they raise prices.

Of course this affects their long term revenue and profitability because customers are afraid that prices of any of the products they use could rise.

Say whatever you want about Amazon, but they have never been a company that cares about the short term. They care about profits for the next 20 years, not Q3 2022.

You’re calling me/my views naive? Seriously? Just after I excoriated someone for name calling?

If RDS is expensive, you can always spin up your own DB deployment, you can use an EC2 instance, or you can just run it via ECS or EKS.

You buy those beefy servers, and where do you put them? you need a data center, where you need data center grade internet lines, you need staff to maintain all that.

> Similarly on the ops/infra folks cost save, for every on-prem infra guy they think they can RIF, they've hired a cloud infra guy who for sure costs more.

I disagree, you will need less cloud infra people, who will likely cost more, however everything will end up being more reliable than having a legion manually maintain everything.

> Likewise for the redundancy/backups/etc being "easy/free" in the cloud, we've already lost data in object store because of poorly execute combination of configuration & actions when try to do some permission changes/copy migration. It was completely unintentional and not noticed for weeks. No one actually executed a literal rm command at the time. Just because the object store advertises zero loss / versioning / etc, you really do still need to do backups.

Did you ever lose data by properly putting something to S3 or Glacier and not doing anything with it?

> However for internal apps at a firm where the usage is largely scaled with staffing levels, the amount of fixed compute makes it hard to argue every app and every use case belongs in the cloud.

It's actually easy to argue: - the world is not going to stay stagnant, if I need 1 more server tomorrow, I can get it in minutes on the Cloud, use it and get rid of it whenever I no longer have a need for it. - the on-prem costs are downplayed, people usually just talk about the cost of the metal and forget the upkeep and extra staff required - the on-prem reliability can be very questionable, hardware failures can cause disasters - cloud stacks can be easier to maintain and hand over, you have less hardware and less operating systems to worry about

Don't believe this has anything to do with the cloud, if you want the same thing with your own data center, it's going to be 18x there as well.

> You can then get a pat on the head ("pass AWS well-architected review").

Or you can be pragmatic, the cloud will allow you to do whatever you want, nobody is stopping you.

> Then they innovate "serverless" stuff

Serverless does not replace everything, there are some things it's good for, but not everything, if you use it for something that it's not useful for then that's an issue with your judgement, not with the fact that it exists as an option.

> And don't even get me started on how much work by this time has gone to build the infra-as-code to manage the rube golderg machine, you'll (seriously) have more lines of CDK code than app logic (that was slower to develop & harder to debug than your actual app code per line).

I have thousands of lines of YAML and MD that I can give to anyone who is skilled enough to copy and paste and that person can 100% replicate the environment without me helping them once.

If a component fails, I can just rebuild it very quickly and 100% accurately by just re-importing the Cloud Formation code, if I need an environment that is 100% same as the one that I already have, I just need to re-run a few scripts and I have it.

What credible alternative can you propose that is better than infrastructure as code?

> They've probably never costed / self administered a server in production use, or if they have, they know to keep quiet.

I could make a similar snarky remark about sys-admins not understanding that the world is not static, however I would instead focus on the fact that acquisition of hardware is nowhere near the total cost of the infrastructure.

According to a 3 second Google search, sys-admins in the US can cost around 75k-140k. Sys-admins can also slow down development by having to perform more manual actions and having to be more over protective, that adds additional costs, because you will still have to pay your idle developers while they are waiting for the sys-admin to action the ticket where they requested write access to their own home folder.

There's high level description at https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/regio...