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Cloud costs are in a bubble

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21–30 of 103 posts

Re: Cloud costs are in a bubble

#21
post #16
post #8

Why are people still using Mongo when you can just set up a jsonb column in Postgres now? Is this just legacy applications that are stuck with Mongo? Certainly nobody is starting new projects on Mongo? Serious question.

Why would you have a dev team who has used mongo before and is comfortable with it move to a different DB? Serious question.

[deleted]

Re: Cloud costs are in a bubble

#22
post #17

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 cons…

I am not disputing the bill, just curious how he got there. He doesn't say in his post.

Re: Cloud costs are in a bubble

#23
post #5

The most valuable information for the average HN reader, especially younger colleagues who have only been in the workforce for the last decade, is that the ~70% gross margins of the hyperscalers, and by extension the $300k+ salaries for early career software developers, has been fueled by a temporary era of low central bank interest rates and an excess of VC capital. This era is almost certainly coming to a close. We…

This is just incredibly frustrating and disheartening to read. How is one supposed to plan for a future in this career when your lifestyle can just disappear overnight?

> This is just incredibly frustrating and disheartening to read. How is one supposed to plan for a future in this career when your lifestyle can just disappear overnight?

Plan like everyone else in your country who has to deal with this uncertainty on significantly lower salaries.

Budget. Save. Trim expenditure. And enjoy your career because you chose it as a career, not because it allowed you a lifestyle.

Re: Cloud costs are in a bubble

#24
post #17

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 cons…

Editing a screenshot to push a narrative is pretty easy. I'm no longer with MongoDB, although still a big fan of the product, but I'm more curious as to how you could rack up a $2,500 bill just trying the product out, especially the serverless offering, coupled that with the guy being a "twitter investor", so that kicked off my BS detector.

MongoDB Atlas runs on the big 3 clouds, and of course you're going to pay more for a fully managed service, as opposed to hosting it yourself directly on the big 3, but racking up $2,500 in serverless compute charges in 24 hours seems very very hard to do, and especially by accident.

Re: Cloud costs are in a bubble

#25

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 seriousl…

> Engineers should be encouraged to control costs

For better or worse a lot of folks are allergic to this. A framing that I’ve seen is to just understand the cost drivers from a technical perspective, for example large materialized views in BigQuery consume a lot of CPU. That’s technically interesting and it’s the reason they’re expensive.

Re: Cloud costs are in a bubble

#26
Everyone always lauds AWS for not raising prices but fails to realize that hardware has continued to get cheaper, faster, and easier. Storage especially has taken such huge leaps that I imagine all of the big cloud companies must be making money hand over fist at this point.

Re: Cloud costs are in a bubble

#27
I think this bubble represents a huge amount of opportunities. Sure the crazy (70%?) gross margins for cloud is insane, but this means there are more cloud companies to be made -- the market isn't saturated yet.

With the right offering and the right software you can build something just 10% as good as some of the hyperscalers and have an amazing company.

Competing on price is not a sin, and it's what I'm working on/betting on.

That said, I think the real big threat to the hyperscalers is cheap chips and more people being able to treat datacenters like parking lots (nice ways to use capital to generate cashflow) -- the commoditization of data center operations.

Re: Cloud costs are in a bubble

#28
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just incredibly frustrating and disheartening to read. How is one supposed to plan for a future in this career when your lifestyle can just disappear overnight?

> This is just incredibly frustrating and disheartening to read. How is one supposed to plan for a future in this career when your lifestyle can just disappear overnight? Plan like everyone else in your country who has to deal with this uncertainty on significantly lower salaries. Budget. Save. Trim expenditure. And enjoy your career because you chose it as a career, not because it allowed you a lifestyle.

And also don't panic, because nobody knows the future (especially in tech), despite the OP's confidence. Nobody knows the future in either direction.

Re: Cloud costs are in a bubble

#29
This also assumes that the open source model of self-hosting is sustainable. We used to have extraordinarily expensive enterprise options for software, then there was an open source boom which eliminated marginal cost with the hope of building the software collaboratively. In practice, many of these open-source projects such as MongoDB simply spent VC money to make the software they were giving away.

Re: Cloud costs are in a bubble

#30
post #19
post #5

The most valuable information for the average HN reader, especially younger colleagues who have only been in the workforce for the last decade, is that the ~70% gross margins of the hyperscalers, and by extension the $300k+ salaries for early career software developers, has been fueled by a temporary era of low central bank interest rates and an excess of VC capital. This era is almost certainly coming to a close. We…

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 pos…

> My prediction is Adtech is far more likely to be in a bubble than cloud computing.

It's always so hard to nail down AdTech, to the outsider it seems like a world filled with bots and bad data and fueled by FOMO. Probably a good chunk of Google's revenue comes from companies that don't really need to advertise, but do so anyways so they won't loose their "competitive edge"

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