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Comment by andrewstuart | Hacker News Reader

>> moving from AWS to onprem means you need to configure the infrastructure yourself; you save on AWS fees but you spend more on devops

This is the traditional “sell” for cloud computing and I don’t buy it at all.

The clouds would have you believe it doesn't make sense to run your own systems because you need too much specialist expertise to run your own systems.

The clouds sales pitch is the if you go cloud then you don’t need all these specialists.

That’s rubbish. Cloud operations need the same or more headcount if technical specialists, they’re just doing different things.

The old “don’t run your own systems, it’s cheaper and easier to go cloud” is just sales fiction.

Don’t believe it.

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Don’t believe it.

You don't need to 'believe'. You need to do an analysis of what you need and how much each option will cost. Then you can know.

If your argument is "I believe onprem saves money" or "I bet AWS is cheaper" or "Jim Morrison came to me in a dream and said I should use Azure" then you haven't done enough research.

> you haven't done enough research.

the research isn't free either. The more indepth and time it takes to do such research, the slower you come to a decision and ship.

Cloud allows you to ship fast. It allows you to go without research - just accept the marketing, and pay up.

You pay above-cost (compared to on-prem) when you grow to a certain size. But this is usually a worthy trade off tbh.

It's a good way to bypass legacy IT teams. A onprem server will have a bunch of snake oil endpoint protection products running on the box, bespoke config changes and take a couple months to get up and running, a ECS container is up and running in minutes and has whatever you shipped in the container without all the commentary from the peanut gallery.

A poor DX can happen in the cloud as well. Waiting weeks for IAM configuration to be solved or a security group to be opened..

I've run into this kind of snake oil in the cloud, as well. Some organizations demand all routing go through an "upstream" VPC operated by the parent org's IT dept, so various third-party security services (WAFs, IDSes, etc.) can scan / inspect the traffic.

When I moved reddit from on-prem to the cloud, I cut our costs by 27%. It was the same number of people managing both infrastructures, but once we moved to the cloud, I no longer spent most of my time imaging machines and driving them to a datacenter to rack and stack them. Instead I spent my time coding ways to manage machines via API, so that when I needed to double our infrastructure, I just ran a script.

Cloud makes a ton of sense for high growth companies. If your infrastructure is mostly static, that's when it makes sense to go to a datacenter. Or if you have one very specific use case, like Dropbox.

This is very unusual in my experience, except in cases where the on-prem was either massively over-provisioned or the customer was getting absolutely gouged on pricing at the DC or IP transit or whatever.

Do you recall what the big savings were in? Compute, storage, DB etc? Be really interested to understand why this case is so different to many I've read.

Funny enough I have the exact numbers handy! Keep in mind this was 2008 and we only had 150M page views a month back then.

Data Center (per month)

Servers: $6K

Cabinet (x3): $15K

Bandwidth: $2.5K

Support: N/A

Total: $23.5K

EC2 (per month)

Servers: $13K

Storage: $1.5K

Bandwidth: $1.1K

Support: $1.2K

Total: $16.8K

Interesting, thanks - I assume on EC2 you were running your own database servers? (Just based on the fact that you don't mention RDS.) This would keep costs down significantly in most cases although I assume they get transferred into staff costs if you've got people maintaining them to get the same level of support for things like backup, replication, etc that you get for "free" in RDS...?

Yes, we ran Postgres on EC2. I admined it myself both in AWS and in the datacenter. RDS didn't exist at the time. :)

At the time we and Heroku were running the two largest Postgres clusters on EC2.

There are hundreds of factors for each company and application. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, but it’s rarely as simple as retail prices.

Even the same number of "technical specialists" doesn't mean it's the same if one option lets you move faster or remain more reliable.

This is precisely my experience and what I observe in companies that fall into the cloud trap. In addition, it is important not to overlook the significant transformation and upskilling process required, as well as the time needed to accomplish it.

Datacenters are expensive to run, for many reasons. That is the appeal of the Cloud right there, before we even start talking about the people aspect.

I challenge any in-house team to achieve the same reliability as S3.

To be fair most businesses probably don't need it, but it is worth taking into account.

the same reliability at what scale? this is a major difference. S3 has amazing reliability but is a incredible complex system with many moving parts, which incurs cost in terms of reliability. The simpler the system, the more reliable it usually is. Most bussiness do not operate at even remotely the same scale as amazon, and running a small scale cluster of S3 like functionality wouldn't be that hard.

S3 is reliable as data isn't not stored in a single place. It reduces the risk of water leakage or some vandals ripping your storage rack apart.

However, as someone put it, put your money where your mouth is. Become a contractor offering to reduce storage costs in exchange for 10% of the savings. You should be a millionaire in no time, according to your narrative.

Amazon S3 standard storage offers the following features: Backed with the Amazon S3 Service Level Agreement. Designed to provide 99.999999999% durability and 99.99% availability of objects over a given year.

> That’s rubbish. Cloud operations need the same or more headcount if technical specialists, they’re just doing different things.

It's a capex vs opex question. For financial quackery reasons, accountants and stock markets prefer having less people on the direct payroll, which is why everything not part of the "core business" is outsourced - even if it is more expensive in either short or long term.

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