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Comment by WrtCdEvrydy | Hacker News Reader

AWS allows you to shift your costs from CapEx to OpEx. Companies with low CapEx are valued higher since "theoretically" you could remove that bill by moving to another provider. Financial Engineering is just another part of software engineering and the cloud enables it.

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This is not a real saving in my experience. The DevOps time for an app is so trivial. I actually just setup a .Net core app on Linux/mysql.

My Linux experience is old and very limited. I have used AWS for years for other things (S3, cloudfront, transcribe, etc.).

Initially I setup an elastic beanstalk app/separate mysql instance on my own AWS account just so I could quickly deploy (all new to me).

Then I setup the app on my client's VM, had to configure Apache, .net core app, service, mysql, mailing.

I would say the elastic beanstalk stuff took about 3 hours (some problems with IAM and Amazon's visual studio plugin, basically ended up having to use my master key). Setting up the VM server, plus a new way to deploying .net core apps and learning/relearning much of linux took 4-5?

So no significant savings there.

Deploys are a few clicks from VS on EB, and take a little longer to the VM, but only because I haven't bothered writing a script that I estimate would take me 1/2 hour at most, in reality probably 5 minutes.

I have clients on (windows) servers that have been running for 10 years with little intervention from me (had to clear some space a couple of times as that client's app saves large files just in case, but they are all backed up on S3 as well).

TL;DR; in my experience DevOps part of running a startup/small enterprise app is basically trivial, a rounding error, compared to time spent on development.

To be fully honest, for personal work, I use Caprover for DevOps.

Edit: The move from CapEx to OpEx is not about savings, it's often about shifting the costs in your books.

I guess I phrased that wrong. Explicitly, DevOps costs are tiny in a startup, even if you do it all yourself with a bare metal server, and moving 0.5% from pot A to pot B makes no difference.

It all depends on the services you provide.

Some businesses would require huge up-front investments without the likes of AWS. DevOps costs might overwhelm you pretty quickly once stuff like compliance becomes a factor, for example.

Sometimes it's not about the technical issues, but documentation, process and qualifications. In B2B there's plenty of that and just the bus factor [1] alone might force a start-up into considering a cloud provider.

In the end it's not just shifting cost, it's also shifting risk and standards and that may or may not be a critical factor.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor

Except that nearly all companies greater than a certain size have an engagement with AWS so they shifted CapEx to CapEx.

> shifted CapEx to CapEx

or in other words, shifted nothing?

Yes, I think the CapEx argument often advanced by the marketing of AWS and C-levels and engineers of large companies moving to the Cloud is just something said to justify the decision and help everybody get on board with it, but I think the CapEx -> OpEx one is fallacious.

There is others reasons for example the flexibility, the managed services, etc. but I don't think this one makes sense.

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