Comment by adrianmsmith | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adrianmsmith | Hacker News Reader

> The cloud excels at two ends of the spectrum ... The first end is when your application is so simple and low traffic that you really do save on complexity by starting with fully managed services .. The second is when your load is highly irregular

I think there's a third, which is when the company is so rich it just doesn't matter. Then saving even a little bit of employee time (which are more likely to be the bottleneck in such a company) is worth basically infinite spend.

I worked at a place where they spent $6k/month on cloud, just for a Java app not doing much plus a PostgreSQL database. I came up with a way to save $2k/month (better indexes), when I did it nobody cared or even noticed I think. I know that $2k/month might not sound like much, but I think the same principle would have been true even if it'd been much more. They spent about $2m/year on an external software development agency to create a React project, full of inefficient scrum meetings and billable hours from project managers and so on, and they didn't really care about that either.

This isn’t only true for “rich” companies.

Companies (particularly young ones) succeed or fail if they are innovating on their products and delivering value to customers. Reducing cloud spend is not doing that.

It may very well improve the bottom line, but when the company is (correctly) more focused on “how do we increase our customers by X% this year”, pursuing those savings is a distraction.

It's true also for companies where CIOs are going to Gartner events and don't want to appear like the only ones not being "cloud-only" or "cloud-first"

Then you end up with BS like the ones described here https://www.the-investing-desk.com/cloud-costs-are-in-a-bubb... where to justify the fact that cloud is much more expensive managers start to throw random numbers vaguely justified just to show that cloud is actually better.

I saw similar things in Corporate world even when choosing a colo/service partner vs doing in-house... managers asking us detailed costs for infra needed (servers, network, licenses etc.) and when you were getting something like 30 in-house vs 100 hosted they just threw some random FTE count to support it to get to 110 vs 100.

Sounds like pure stupidity and incompetence. Why not buy a bunch of Ferrari's and beat them up with sledge hammers while they are at it?

I think if you're working at a company that makes a huge amount of money, it just isn't really rational to care that much about spend. I think of it like this: If a person had $100m in the bank, I reckon they're not going to care whether their beer costs $7.00 or $7.10. There are just more important things to worry about.

Sure between $7.10 and $7.00, who cares, but now we are talking more like $7 or $70. If I had $100m I would prefer to pay $7 for the beer and spend the remaining $63 on something more useful.

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