a lot of time its not about saving money. you can't even hire/afford people if you are a small/mid size company.
The cost of cloud
41–50 of 137 posts
Re: The cost of cloud
#42I really like how these claim in the post not backed up by anything.
Re: The cost of cloud
#43Hiring your own security guard is cheaper than paying an outsourcing firm. Hiring your own janitor is cheaper than paying an outsourcing firm. Building your own office is cheaper than renting one. Doing your taxes with pen and paper is cheaper than paying turbo tax. Making your own food is cheaper than eating out. Hiring a cook directly is cheaper than hiring sudexo. I could keep going. But sometimes it’s not just co…
It's still about cost. (1) opportunity cost: doing your own systems administration instead of growing your business (features, marketing, etc). (2) switching cost: once you have a working system that outgrows the free / cheap AWS tiers, and might be cheaper to run outside cloud, switching away from the cloud becomes expensive, and does not look like a good investment to many, see (1).
Opportunity cost is everything. Staffing for a small startup, after funding, is a huge bottleneck. Every second you spend managing an install of Rabbitmq, be it on a VM or on-prem, is time spent not working on the app, or anything else that's drastically more important.
Re: The cost of cloud
#44Hiring your own security guard is cheaper than paying an outsourcing firm. Hiring your own janitor is cheaper than paying an outsourcing firm. Building your own office is cheaper than renting one. Doing your taxes with pen and paper is cheaper than paying turbo tax. Making your own food is cheaper than eating out. Hiring a cook directly is cheaper than hiring sudexo. I could keep going. But sometimes it’s not just co…
Not really. As far as I can tell, the core value of AWS is letting accountant shift CAPEX to OPEX.
The technical considerations are a distant second or third place.
Re: The cost of cloud
#45Hiring your own security guard is cheaper than paying an outsourcing firm. Hiring your own janitor is cheaper than paying an outsourcing firm. Building your own office is cheaper than renting one. Doing your taxes with pen and paper is cheaper than paying turbo tax. Making your own food is cheaper than eating out. Hiring a cook directly is cheaper than hiring sudexo. I could keep going. But sometimes it’s not just co…
I'm not even sure it's cheaper. At a previous employer we had approximately 150k of cloud expenses per annum. Bringing that in house would have eclipsed the cloud expenses on additional staffing costs alone.
You can outsource the staffing costs too. This also turns out to be much cheaper due to economies of scale. :)
Re: The cost of cloud
#46Hiring your own security guard is cheaper than paying an outsourcing firm. Hiring your own janitor is cheaper than paying an outsourcing firm. Building your own office is cheaper than renting one. Doing your taxes with pen and paper is cheaper than paying turbo tax. Making your own food is cheaper than eating out. Hiring a cook directly is cheaper than hiring sudexo. I could keep going. But sometimes it’s not just co…
Not really. As far as I can tell, the core value of AWS is letting accountant shift CAPEX to OPEX. The technical considerations are a distant second or third place.
Could you elaborate how this is an advantage?
In my previous role, my manager argued for my work as a developer to be charged as Capex to the project instead of Opex.
Why would accountants want the opposite for AWS?
Re: The cost of cloud
#47I have a rule that is simple, effective but also quite rude: if you can't deliver and maintain a 500 instances large infrastructure, same uptime and all, at half the cost of AWS by yourself (1 person) in 3 months using only open source solutions basically you should not have an opinion about this. You are just rationalizing your incompetence on this particular subject. Sorry to be this blunt but I am simply tired of…
I don't consider this rude or blunt, but rather incomplete as I really am not sure what points are frustrating for you or what you would hope someone takes away from it -- I'm an outside observer on the cloud subject as I have seen huge debates over use of the public cloud internally at my company and also with client companies.
I've seen the billing costs of the public cloud absolutely demolish an IT org's yearly budget in a month because of unexpected cost upticks, and I've seen a reduction in total cost of ownership by reducing needed licensing/staff/building costs. I get both sides on what the public cloud can do.
I've also seen what you can do on-premises; I've worked with clients who manage 7000+ machines (mostly virtual + some physical) with a team of 4 using pretty reasonably priced on-site hardware. (pro-tip, I guess Hitachi boxes are absurdly great servers with fantastic uptime, pockmarked only by an absolutely horrendous UI to manage)
My experience from the many clients I work with is that it is less about the specific stack you settle on and more your comfort level in getting the most efficiency out of it. The deeper and more intimate you are with all levels of your infrastructure, the better you know how to eke out the most from every single $.01 you spend on it.
Re: The cost of cloud
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not really. As far as I can tell, the core value of AWS is letting accountant shift CAPEX to OPEX. The technical considerations are a distant second or third place.
Could you elaborate how this is an advantage? In my previous role, my manager argued for my work as a developer to be charged as Capex to the project instead of Opex. Why would accountants want the opposite for AWS?
if the project is in R&D phase, we call it "captalization" . other than that, the regular employee is generally opex and sent to profit and loss
Re: The cost of cloud
#49A crucial point is to ensure that you give yourself
the ability to move from your cloud providers to on prem,
and / or to a different cloud.
A bad example: If you are with provide X and they change pricing structure and it impacts you 3 times the cost, you can move it without too much hassle.
Once you embrace all the proprietary and fancy features that your cloud provider has, then you are stuck and moving will be a nightmare.
compute/s3 are easy to move. k8s should be easy to move but I have not tried it myself. Database hosting is easy to change as long as you are using an independent product, not a custom database your cloud provider has.
It is much more difficult when you have AWS/Azure pipelines, AWS/Azure Geo location/manipulation AWS/Azure proprietary scaling etc etc
Terraform is supposed to help here but in my experience with TF consultants it is not at all straightforward not compatible with a lot of AWS/Azure offerings.
Then you are stuck and moving will be difficult and expensive. Which of course is the business plan for the cloud providers.
Re: The cost of cloud
#50Just curious: if you are an enterprise, what do you think (besides cost) is a compelling argument in 2022 for not going to a public cloud? This is probably a Ask HN, so please do point me to it if you know an existing one.
Cost is a huge one, but availability and service priority is a big one for me: Amazon and Microsoft are going to provide service and choose to deploy updates and do maintenance on schedules that work for them, not schedules that work for you. Your in-house IT department knows not to take a risk the week before your big product launch. Amazon and Microsoft simply do not care about your product launch at all, and proba…
having your own control about maintenances is a big one.
the same with being able to give your customers flexibility in terms of when maintenance happens. this is a big deal in b2b space, especially with long running client relationships because it gives customers some form of control they never are going to get back in the public cloud unless they are insanely large customers.