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Comment by ascendantlogic | Hacker News Reader

>But we're still talking like $170/month

Rounding error for most companies.

>The extra cost is a bit of Linux sys admin which can be fully automated

You are overweighting hard dollar costs and underweighting the value of engineering time. Maybe you're the worlds greatest devops/platform engineer/sysadmin and once you wire up everything in under 5 minutes it will never need maintenance ever again but for most everyone else speeding up image builds by using a service that someone else thinks about and does maintenance on is absolutely worth it for $170/mo.

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Yes, maybe. I do know Linux pretty well and don't consider sysadmin costs a big drain on my own company or time. I can see that it'd be much more expensive if you hire people who don't have much UNIX experience.

On the other hand, I've experienced first hand how cloud costs can explode uncontrollably in absurd ways. One company I worked at had a cloud cost crisis and they weren't even serving online services, just shovelling money into Azure for generic dev services like VMs for load tests, DBs for testing, super-slow CI agents, etc. They never managed to properly fix this because of the mentality you express here: a few hundred bucks a month here, a few hundred there, everyone gets access to spin up resources and it's all worth it because we're all soooo valuable. Then one day you realize you're inexplicably burning millions on subscription services and cloud spend, yet nobody can identify quite why or on what, or how to push costs down. Death by a thousand cuts, it was quite the revelation. Free cloud credits are murder, because they embed a culture of profligacy and "my time is too valuable to optimize this". By the time the startup credits run out it's too late.

I think the problem is that once you get in that mindset, you start forgetting that you need to optimize/fix your application.

Having network issues due to slow async calls? Just increase instance size until the machine is so fast it completes everything before it becomes a problem. Now you are paying 10x more for something that’s a few hours of dev time.

I think you're giving the worst-case scenario when citing large-scale cloud spend. A couple of hundred dollars a month for very fast builds is a good deal, and they can build on Intel and ARM, which is useful.

Worst case scenario, I mean, maybe? I don't have many data points. It does feel like cloud costs come up more often lately. I don't think there was anything particularly special about that company though. It felt like almost the default outcome of using modern development practices and giving everyone who "needed" it access to the Azure console.

I have accidentally spent far too much on Azure logging before, so I am a firm believer in giving as much (read-only) access as possible!

You should probably include the cost of your own salary in your calculations

I'm running a bootstrapped startup so a special case, my salary is nearly nothing :) :( :)

At a bigger company you'd just ask a junior to set it up or maybe a sysadmin. You can probably contract to get part timers too. I guess I spent half a day or so setting up the CI cluster at the start and have barely touched it since. That wasn't much cost even if I was earning a big salary. Our builds can use caches to speed them up (not docker, other types of cache) and when we turned that on it was like a 3x speed win, so having persistent disks is definitely worth it for many types of program. Especially if you're brave and trust your build system to cache unit test results between builds!

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