491–500 of 513 posts
> AWS is extremely expensive. I really like how people throw around these baseless accusations. S3 is one of the cheapest storage solutions ever created. The last 10 years I have migrated roughly 10-20PB worth of data to AWS S3 and it resulted in significant cost saving every single time. If you do not know how to use cloud computing than yes, AWS can be really expensive.
The implicit claims are more misleading, in my opinion: The claim that self-hosting is free or nearly free in terms of time and engineering brain drain. The real cost of self-hosting, in my direct experience with multiple startup teams trying it, is the endless small tasks, decisions, debates, and little changes that add up over time to more overhead than anyone would have expected. Everyone thinks it’s going to be a…
Not only is that not an implicit claim in the post, they explicitly say the that it's not free, it's actually just around the same amount of time they used to spend with AWS:
> Total toil is ~14 engineer-hours/month, including prep. The AWS era had us spending similar time but on different work: chasing cost anomalies, expanding Security Hub exceptions, and mapping breaking changes in managed services. The toil moved; it did not multiply.
As for the following:
> If you’re a stable business with engineers sitting idle that could be the right choice. For most startups who just need to get a product out there and get customers, pulling limited headcount away from the core product to save pennies (relatively speaking) on a potential AWS bill can be a trap.
You're just agreeing with them:
> Cloud-first was the right call for our first five years. Bare metal became the right call once our compute footprint, data gravity, and independence requirements stabilised.
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In orgs I have seen this it is usually a symptom of the data center unit being starved of resources. It’s like they have only been given the choice of on prem but ridiculous paperwork and long lead times or pay 20x for cloud. Like can’t we just give the data center org more money and they can over provision hardware. Or can we not have them use that extra money to rent servers from OVH/Hetzner during the discovery ph…
I feel like companies are unreasonably afraid of cost up front, never mind that they’re going to pay more for cloud over the next 6 months, spending 6x monthly cloud cost on a single server makes them hesitate. It’s how they always refuse to spend half my monthly salary on the computer I work on, and instead insist I use an underpowered windows machine.
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Yes. Cloud sellers new this: Happy path for this flagship project, the shinny new object, and some additional services. After the point of no return what usually happens is, that cloud will be a replica of bare metal development. As an Computer Science dude and former C64/Amiga coder in Senior Management of a large international Bank, I saw first hand, how cost balloon simply due to the fact, that the bank recreates…
Ferrari actually makes tractors.
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Yes. Cloud sellers new this: Happy path for this flagship project, the shinny new object, and some additional services. After the point of no return what usually happens is, that cloud will be a replica of bare metal development. As an Computer Science dude and former C64/Amiga coder in Senior Management of a large international Bank, I saw first hand, how cost balloon simply due to the fact, that the bank recreates…
Ferrari actually makes tractors.
IIRC, he only got into making cars because Enzo Ferrari disrespected him.
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I'm not either. I used to do fully managed hosting solutions at a datacenter. I had to do everything from hardware through debugging customer applications. Now, people pay me to do the same but on cloud platforms and the occasional on-prem stuff. In general, the younger people I've come across have no idea how to set anything up. They've always just used awscli, the AWS Console, or terraform. I've even been ridiculed…
Why do you think public cloud is worse for the environment than a private dc? I'd expect the larger dcs to be more energy efficient.
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> if your using the right services, if someone asked you tomorrow to scale 100x you likely could during the workday. "The right services" is I think doing a lot of work here. Which services specifically are you thinking of? - S3? sure, 100x, 1000x, whatever, it doesn't care about your scale at all (your bill is another matter). - Lambdas? On their own sure you can scale arbitrarily, but they don't really do anything…
> Nope, you are not scaling this 100x without a LOT of planning and prep work. You're note getting 100x increase in instances without justifying it to your account manager, anyway, long before you figure out how to get it to work. EC2 has limits on the number of instances you can request, and it certainly won't let you 100x unless you've done it before and already gone through the hassle to get them to raise your lim…
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> The shared theme of all of the failure stories is missing the true cost of self-hosting: The hours spent getting the servers just right, managing the hosting, debating the best way to run things, and dealing with little issues add up but are easily lost in the noise if you’re not looking closely. What the modern software business seems to have lost is the understanding that ops and dev are two different universes.…
> What the modern software business seems to have lost is the understanding that ops and dev are two different universes. This is a fascinating take, if you ask me, treating them as separate is the whole problem! The point of being an engineer is to solve real world problems, not to live inside your own little specialist world. Obviously there's a lot to be said for being really good at a specialized set of skills, b…
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The "AWS ops team" is often 1-2 people and often part of the dev team formally, often augmented by external consultancies like mine. You start seeing that kind of structure in teams with 10+ people when the dev created infra starts collapsing under its own weight and they realise they need people with actual ops skillset.
I have literally never seen this at 20, 400, or 3000 engineers. But the companies that I've worked at have all been "name brand" or startups on the path to acquisition.
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Same difference. Just because the huge amount of AWS work is distributed among other teams doesn't mean it's less work. AWS in 2025 is way more work than Heroku/Fly/Vercel, but also more way work than renting bare metal from say Hetzner/OVH, and perhaps even more than renting colo.
This is only true if you're not using value added services. In my experience, teams that don't accelerate by adopting cloud won't use something like SQS or Fargate, they'll throw an MQ on a k8s cluster and get enraged when it doesn't work how they expected.
AWS services are great quality, but they are extremely expensive.