Cloud costs are in a bubble

I have always kind of disliked both cloud and containers. Primarily, they just add more complexity and overhead into the computing landscape. I've thought this to be bad both in material resources and energy consumption, but humans have a high time preference, and therefore they choose to spend both materials and resources to get a little more time back. This is much the same reason that hipster languages and frameworks are in a constant state of churn. I myself am guilty of perpetuating these things that I dislike from an analytical perspective where I say they are wasteful, because I often just want to get something done so I spin up a cloudy service of some kind, deploy some code, close a ticket and walk away knowing I didn't go about things the "correct" way.

For all of this to stop, not only does the bubble need to burst but people would need to be far more intentional about what resources they use where and when. People would also need to have longer software lifecycles, more QA, and so on. This would only happen in an environment with far higher interest rates and far lower monetary velocity. In essence, there'd have to be a lower tolerance of risk to stop the constant churn of hardware, software, and development methodologies on both. There are tradeoffs to such changes.

Be it VC money, or just general apathy, it seems cloud costs are rarely a priority. My biggest gripe is when see that justification that goes like, "developer's time is $100/hr and better spent elsewhere." Okay, I agree, doing something like self-hosting everything to reduce costs would be a terrible idea, but there's a fine balance.

In 2019, Lyft spent $300M on AWS [1]. Sure, it's a big service, but are you seriously telling my that it's necessary to spend $300M in a single year?

I think the meme that developer's time spent on cost control is useless needs to die. Engineers should be encouraged to control costs so that they can take better decisions early on. They should be nudged to pick more cost-efficient choices. This won't only reduce costs, the chances are companies will also end up having dramatically simpler architecture.

[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/01/lyft-plans-to-spend-300-mill...

It's absolutely a balance, but I've seen it the other way too. Devs spending weeks to make something more efficient when compute time costs cents.

That has a minimum cost of their hourly rate. The maximum cost is the cost of not doing what's most valuable to the company.

> In 2019, Lyft spent $300M on AWS [1]. Sure, it's a big service, but are you seriously telling my that it's necessary to spend $300M in a single year?

They didn't spend that in a single year.

It also depends what they were doing, I was recently very shocked by the data costs of a major hardware store in the US but after breaking it down it made more sense. It all depends what they get for that $300M over 3 years.

I find it interesting that there are two MongoDb Directors of Developer Relations in this thread - one former, one current - either attempting to replicate the suggested costs to see if the author's faking it, or outright blaming him he is.

Dude's got a screenshot. I doubt he faked it for the attention - he probably actually got that bill.

He feels it's expensive and he should pay less for the value he's getting considering his alternatives (Azure VMs in a 1/3 of the price).

Perhaps refer to the actual price of a billed hour there? That feels like the core theme here.

Always good advice to budget and prepare for the worst, but wow this is a big stretch from the article.

Of the large salary companies - Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are in the cloud space. Google doesn't make most of its profits from cloud. Netflix and Facebook don't sell these services at all. Dropbox and Digital Ocean (and sort of Cloudflare) are also in the cloud space and aren't known for such salaries.

It's possible everything is in a bubble from the low interest rates. My prediction is Adtech is far more likely to be in a bubble than cloud computing. The productivity gains and small number of people who can fill the role for cloud are going keep it dominate probably for a long time even in a recession.