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Comment by margorczynski | Hacker News Reader

Once your operation is stable and you know (almost) exactly what you need then sticking to the Cloud makes less and less sense. The premium they charge is enormous.

Not sure why e.g. Netflix doesn't exit AWS considering their needs flatlined. Or maybe they have some special agreement with much lower prices than market.

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>” Or maybe they have some special agreement with much lower prices than market.”

These exist and falls under the “Enterprise Discount Program”, but there are other PPAs (Private Pricing Addendum).

The idea with EDP is if you have qualifying on-demand use that not covered by a Savings Plan or Reserved Instance, you instead get the EDP discount applied to the line item.

Where I work is actively renegotiating its EDP discount. Right now we get 14% off for applicable on-demand usage.

There are also other programs. Such as the “Amazon Partner Network” “Workload Migration Program” (APN WMP) for SAAS companies, which are credits (lump sum, not per line item) that are awarded for moving customers to your SAAS products that are hosted on AWS infrastructure. These are big 6-digit chunks for us. Many other credits and programs as well.

What the cloud gives you is the removal of the inter-department conflict between IT and Product Engineering. This is especially bad since IT is a cost-center rather than a revenue generator. Having a single provider who in turn has a single client is a horrible dynamic. It can work for the short term but long term you get really odd dynamics. Sure the cloud is expensive but so is the aggregate opportunity cost of waiting 3 months and spending 20 hours in meetings for a single dev server.

A 24/7 oncall rotation team needs 5 people to keep it <1 rotation per month. This alone costs 1M/y.

I think many companies simply get away by having unhealthy oncall rotations. E.g. ask people to oncall outside business hours constantly.

Or their stuff doesn't break such that being oncall is a formality.

This is a great way to put it, and I don’t see this reality acknowledged on HN very often.

This quite often comes down to CapEx vs OpEx.

Hardware leasing/equipment financing is OpEx. The difference vs cloud is you’ll get much more capability at a fraction of the cost and own an asset at the end.

I talk about it a lot on HN but if you really want to get the financial types excited about leasing there are all kinds of interesting options like Section 179 Qualified Financing that can often sweeten the pot further.

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