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Comment by chiph | Hacker News Reader

> A big chunk of the Amazon price should be considered as providing flexibility in the future.

A recent place I worked at didn't understand this. They were going to the cloud as a strategic move because they didn't want to run a data center any more. Their computing needs were stable and predictable - no "Black Friday" sales that needed triple the servers for a short part of the year. They were going to end up paying far more for the total computing cost than if they had just kept buying blade servers and VMWare licenses.

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I've worked somewhere that didn't care. Business SaaS platform, that moved to the cloud because maintaining servers was dull and taking up too much developer and devops headspace. The entire yearly spend was about as much as the salary of an ops person.

I'd argue that companies where the hosting costs are the primary, or even a significant cost, are a small minority.

I worked somewhere where the resident DevOps/Sysadmin guy would rather repeatedly write me emails about using an extra 10GB of disk for a data science project than just buy more storage. And this was on an instance with like half as much memory as disk available. There are some people in this industry who just have zero business sense.

Then there are people on the opposite side of the spectrum who don't even look at server costs. I have a task sitting in our backlog to optimize our instance usage which could save us over $100,000 a year. It has been constantly deprioritized in order work on feature development which is stupid because we could hire another developer to do it in a few days and then keep him to increase our feature development all while costing our company the same amount of money.

Granted, I think this is more of a case of the prisoners dilemma [0] between lower management and upper management (lower management doesn't want to work on it because it doesn't produce features that make him look good but he also does not want to propose the additional developer for it because then upper management will just tell lower management to do it without the additional developer).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma

This is a pretty common trend in lots of places. These kind of decisions are driven for things other than computing needs. Maybe to look cool/cloudy/nextgen ...

You can design for and get steady-state discounts on cloud too. It's not only about flexibility but also maintainability and ops overhead. The increased spend on cloud is still usually less than the cost of a sysadmin/IT team and the handling of inevitable hardware and DC issues.

This is what happens when directors and C-level folks get a reputation bonus from being able to talk about how they "led a migration to the cloud" in their previous company.

A lot of times companies can yield short term savings because of how they depreciate or are taxed on assets like server rooms and equipment.

Most of the times I saw that,they did it because in-house pricing was insane and in IT they wanted to cut costs.

Fire team, comeback a few years with a new cheaper team and in-house pricing.

Job done

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