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Comment by maerF0x0 | Hacker News Reader

I've said this a hundred times and it seems not loud enough.

AWS is not cheap because of your server costs.

AWS is cheap because of elasticity, velocity (opportunity cost of next feature), and reduced maintenance hours.

"The cloud" was never (afaik) was about getting a cheaper VPS. It was about being able to get them on demand, give them back on demand, and generally not have to maintain anything besides your code (and maybe apply updates to datastores / AMIs)

Now, if those premises are not true for your startup/business, then AWS is not the tool for you. I didnt see any analysis of ongoing maintenance costs in the 800k saved, but will it take 1-2 FTE engineers to now be more oncall, more server upgrades, more security patches etc? That's easily 1/2 that savings gone already.

Edit: for the most part these attributes apply to GCP, Azure, Heroku etc as well, its not just about AWS

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Prerender as I can see is founded by Hungarian and most employees are Hungarian.

Even if he hired 2 FTEs in Hungary to maintain (which I doubt), it would eat 200k at most (probably much less), so they still saved 600k.

For 800k he could probably hire 10 more people, to improve development, sales, marketing, support, and that would be better investment instead of burning money on AWS.

Fair enough, I assumed typical San Francisco/Silicon valley model.

I’m from Hungary, and I have to tell you, you are WAY off with those salaries.

As a senior software engineer, you can make maybe $35k a year, before taxes, if you are good. You can make it $50k if you are very good.

2 years ago I was making $23k (yearly, before taxes), before I moved to Canada and started working at Amazon for $170k usd.

Europe, especially the eastern parts of europe has an extremely cheap workforce.

> As a senior software engineer, you can make maybe $35k a year, before taxes, if you are good. > ..especially the eastern parts of europe has an extremely cheap workforce.

You can make that amount normally in Eastern Europe when working on local market, you do not need to be good, average is enough. If you are good then you can make 60k+ USD. And if you are really good you can make easily 100k+ USD working for US based company remotely.

I think there's some "cheat codes" now involving some of these things though. For instance, you can use some of AWS but keep your actual compute/networking out and have things like security patching and server inventory be completely solved by using AWS SSM. There's also options like EKS Anywhere to have managed on-prem k8s for way, way cheaper than running it in AWS proper. These kinds of services I think are the future for hybrid/on-prem folks.

Elasticity is a gamble. You're betting that you can save more money investing in an elastic/on demand stack than what you'd pay for static resources. Judging by how much the cloud providers push this, the unknown cost to create/maintain auto scaling infra/apps, and how intricate the pricing gets with elastic resources/spots/faas, I still think the cloud providers are coming out ahead vs folks using static compute.

Not really. You're paying extra to not have to think about how many static resources to allocate in advance.

For a mature business, that tradeoff probably isn't worth it, but for a startup, the opportunity cost is too high. Spending a lot on cost optimization doesn't make sense; you are better off spending on growing income.

Yep, the cloud was always about flexibility and convenience, not cost.

This is one of the few accurate comments in this thread.

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