So your organisation is so inefficient that it’s easier to just engage a third party to syphon off any profitability?
Very few organizations are able to stay efficient on the long run as they scale. This is a simple matter of processes being stacked on top of processes and inter-departement frictions. That complexity is inherent to having regulations and laws that you need to comply with that become hard requirements.
For a more concrete example think of HIPAA compliance, during an audit you can have everything on-prem and hope that your IT department actually understand the security and privacy boundaries or have everything in AWS and be compliant because they conform to the standard by default.
> syphon off any profitability
For most of those businesses software is not the profitable bit, it's a cost center like most other things that serve to support operations. In that context, migrating your code to AWS/GCP/Azure means very little cost inflation.
But at least it solves the basics.
So much of HIPAA is actually getting the administration right.
Simply using AWS doesn't do anything to help with this in that same long run. Give it a decade or two and those same organizations will suddenly have multiple bureaucratic departments to approve new AWS resources and spending.
All AWS is offering is a channel that a bureaucratic process hasn't been developed for _yet_ and the organizations hivemind response is to allow its usage freely because it doesn't fit in the existing form template of rules
A decade or two is someone else's problem.
And all that for less than the price of _one_ competent sysadmin's monthly salary.
How would you suggest a company would match that with local servers and sysadmins?
One sysadmin per 8 hour shift = 3 people for 24 hour rotation, you need 1-2 extra so that if one is sick the others don't need to pull a double. That's $400k a year alone.
Then you need to get the 12 identical servers purchased and shipped around the globe to colocation. Now at least one, preferably two, of the admins needs to be a proficient DBA so they can get the replicating SQL running.
Now you need to build monitoring for all of that and runbooks on what to do if crap breaks outside of office hours.
..and now a server has kicked the bucket, you need to buy a new one from $vendor, get it delivered and set up in Australia - you're in Michigan.
And in some years the servers are underpowered because your business has grown, now you need to buy 12 new ones and get them installed.
I can do all that from home without putting on my pants. I might need to grab a shirt if the AWS people want to hop on Zoom for something. =)
This is why we use the cloud and managed services, usually it's either out of our hands anyway or already fixed when we manage to log in. For the last two biggest downtimes I've encountered even Meta's crap was offline too (FB, Instagram at least).
Cloud is not always an obvious win, and depends a lot on where you work
BUT it depends on what field you're in. If you're managing CCPA/GDPR/HIPAA data it's a huge bureaucracy mess to get everything certified. Cloud operators usually have their documented and certified already, you just need to figure out your own part.
Hey I can do that too in our on-prem environment because it's well managed. Hell, I can do that in my fricken homelab if you'll accept postgress.
Cloud is neat and the major vendors know how to manage it. That doesn't mean you need to pay them to use a well managed platform, but you do need to pay _somebody_.
Like a bootstrapped one or two person startup. Or could I borrow your globally distributed home lab? =)
The difference here is that I can pay AWS by the hour (or even by the minute or second). I can’t hire a sysadmin like that.
I can try a few high GPU instances for 6 hours and shut them down. But if I need to buy 6 4090’s and the hardware to run them, I’m stuck with the choice and down a few tens of thousands.
Oh hey, that's my cloud spend.
EOM I have nothing, every month.
Come tell me how it went =)
I've yet to see a manager who wants to spend money up front for stuff they might possibly need in the future. YMMV
You would be spending that 20k regardless assuming the company is growing.