There was an article not long ago from AWS saying they'll be focussing on cutting cost for customers. Maybe the next step of that process will be pushing their clients off of AWS and telling them to just host on prem.
If your business invests in physical servers anticipating strong growth next year then later finds out actually we're going into a recession and those servers are no longer needed, then that's a sunk cost.
With cloud if demand drops you can scale up and down as needed. Helping customers cut costs during difficult times makes sense since those customers are more likely to survive and stay with you through good times.
So in context I think this article makes sense since long-term sustainable growth of AWS should be linked with the growth of their customers' businesses.
Cloud vendors also mostly sell minimum use packages for discounts in the range of 20 to 80% (called e.g. "committed use discount" or "compute savings plan"). Lots of businesses use those, because two-digit discounts are real money, but they might find themselves in the same spot as with physical hardware they don't need...
And cloud proponents pretend data center / rack space / server leasing doesn't exist either, for those trying to avoid large up front costs.
It also means some poor fuck at AWS gets woken up in the middle of the night instead of me when things go to shit.
It absolutely comes at a cost, and might not be the right fit for an organisation that's absolutely on top of it's hardware requirements and can afford to divert resources from new development work. For the rest of us it saves a lot of dev hours that would have otherwise been spent in pointless meetings or debating the best implementation of whatever half-baked stack has oozed it's way out of the organisation in an attempt to replicate what's handed to you with a cloud solution.
And endless orgies of "call for pricing" with hardware vendors and hosting. Shitty websites where you can buy preconfigured servers somewhat cheaply, or vendor websites where you can configure everything but overpay. Useless sales-droids trying to "value-add" stuff on top.
Cloud buys are a lot friendlier, because you only have the one cloud vendor to worry about. Entry level you just pay list price by clicking a button. If you buy a lot, you are big enough to have your own business people to hammer out a rebate on list price, still very easy, still very simple. But overall still more expensive unfortunately.
I'd hope there aren't actually hours of meetings for a single $5/mo VM?
But I would hope there are reviews and meetings when deploying enough of these to amount to real money. Companies that don't do that soon enough find themselves with a million dollar AWS bill without understanding what's going on.
Spend is spend, it's vital to understand what is being spent on what and why.
Slightly exaggerated in the case of the $5 machine, probably 2-3 manhours total but it took 4 days for it to be deployed instead of ~5 minutes. We did spent tens of hours justifying why the business should spend ~$100 more per month on a production system where the metrics clearly indicated that it was resource constrained.
The same IT department that demanded we justify every penny spent did not apply any of that rigour to their own spending. Control over the deployment of resources was used as a political tool to increase their headcount.
> I would hope there are reviews and meetings when deploying enough of these to amount to real money. Companies that don't do that soon enough find themselves with a million dollar AWS bill without understanding what's going on.
I consider the judicious use of resources to be part of my job as a software engineer. A development team that isn't considering how they can reduce spend, tidy up, or right-size their resources is a massive red flag to me. Organisations frequently shoot themselves in the foot by shifting that responsibility away from the development team. The result is usually factional infighting and more meetings.
Also it's going to be simpler to provision your base (commited use) on the cloud and then handle bursts on the cloud, than it is to have your base on prem and burst to the cloud.
You can buy physical servers in leasing ,turning it into opex
You can also rent them for little bit extra via managed dedicated servers from vendors like OVH.
Not going with a big cloud provider def doesn’t mean that you need to buy physical servers and build an on-prem data center.
...while forgetting to have sane on-call rotation for cloud you also need at least 3 people on that rotation that are also clued in on cloud operation enough. Sure they can be "developers" but if your app architecture requires so little maintenance and flea removal that they are not doing ops jobs much, chances are so would it in either rented or dedicated server env.
If a business invest into a cloud infrastructure and create a binding contract for 5 years, only to find out that they actually want to abandon that project a year later, that is also a sunk cost. Long term contracts tend to be cheaper, so its a trade off between saving money vs risk.
It all depend on the risk analysis, how risk averse one want to be, and the economics/liquidity needs.
You don't need to go all in on buying racks and other hardware, when you can rent servers at Hetzner at a cheaper cost than aws.
Yes, but that sunk cost is probably still lower than what you paid AWS for the option to scale up and down.
Once you have on-premises you need people that know switches, routers, rackmount server, hardware, virtualization, etc, plus keeping all of that properly maintained (security patches, IaC, periodic updates, analyzing performance, making sure it's properly architected, etc).
I often see people saying it's the same cost or less but it's really not. Unless you have no idea what you should be doing.
Virtualization, IaC, analyzing performance, right architecture etc is all for later, when you've grown enough to need that.
Yeah, I think it might be a different perspective about when that all should be done.
I tend to do that right from the beginning because I often see it snowball later on and nobody ever fixes it or does it "properly" (in my opinion, possibly not the right one).
But that's a good point, no doubt.
A really cheap server leasing deal will cost you yearly about as much as the purchase price of the server. With opaque AWS services it is probably more like a month of subscription to pay for the hardware that you are indirectly using.
Thankfully after they understood the problem it only took 8 months of procurement, techs going to the data center 10+ times with endless screw ups, and everyone pointing the finger at each other.
While the cloud sucks in many ways the traditional setup has big problems as soon as you hit a midsize company ime.
A cloud vendor (who will be nameless as I signed an NDA specifically that prevents me from disparaging them; but one of the big three) ran out of capacity for me and it was 3 months before they managed to fix it. -- that was with a couple million a month in spend.
Cloud is still servers; you just depend on someone elses capacity management skills and you hope that there isn't a rush to populate a location (like when a region goes down and everyone's auto-provisioners move regions to yours)
I have to deal with a grumpy finance guy that thinks my whole department is overpaid already, especially so if we might use the dreaded `CapEx` word.
They were entirely unusable.
Opening a relatively small file in notepad could take multiple minutes. OS click and typing response times were measured in seconds.
Despite wasting thousands of developer hours each year, they refused to upgrade their data center. Probably because doing so would have been a major budget fight that requires an executive to actually advocate for something instead of making their characteristic animalistic grunts of agreement.
For better or worse I haven't seen the same issue with cloud expenditure. It seems to be perceived as a necessary expense, rather than the engineering department getting ideas above their station.
Typing/executing in Powershell was just as slow
Really though, it seems like a hybrid on-prem/cloud approach is one to consider. Software like Anthos eases this, though there are also pitfalls with this approach too.
Although in this specific case, being a team at AWS, they are using their own company data centers, so it's essentially on-prem to them.
its quite simple, if workload x can be done 100% cheaper on-prem then its an obvious move (probably) if AWS manage to get that closer to 30-40% then the operational benefits of using AWS make more sense, more workloads, more total spend.
(They finally delivered 3.10 last month at least)
1. https://dev.l1x.be/posts/2023/02/28/using-python-3.11-with-a...
> Lambda also optimizes the image and caches it close to where the functions runs so cold start times are the same as for .zip archives.[0]
This[1] article shows almost no discernable difference in .NET cold start times between containerised and regular lambdas.
It's easy to imagine developers pushing up bloated images, slowing startup down and blaming docker/AWS for it.
[0] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/working-with-lambda-lay...
[1] https://www.kloia.com/blog/aws-lambda-container-image-.net-b...
I'm not so sure it's a black/white true/false. Depends on what goes in the docker image. It's something like for larger deployments docker is faster but for small deployments it's the other way.
And then charging them to use AWS anywhere and outpost!