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Comment by zer00eyz | Hacker News Reader

>>> It's that cloud providers are now often seen as the only responsible way to operate infrastructure

23 billion.

Thats the profit for AWS in 2023.

23 billon that AWS users pissed away.

AWS is NOT cheap. I have quite a few clients who, could save lots of money dumping their cloud provider and setting up their own racks, hiring SA's. I have others who, if they optimized any of their stack could cut their AWS bills by half.

Having survived the 2000 bubble the lessons are going to have to be re-learned. Everything has cost and value and managing that is going to become an engineering task in the near future.

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> 23 billon that AWS users pissed away.

While I agree that running your own hardware can be _seriously_ cheaper, this is like saying that renting is a waste of money and everyone should purchase a home.

Capacity planning isn't easy for a lot of small companies. Neither is the engineering time to set up, manage, and troubleshoot the hardware. At a certain scale, these are no brainers to take into your own hands, but for a 15 person engineering team that's completely focused on the product, it would be pretty expensive in human cost to set up and manage your own hardware. Sometimes, it can be set-and-forget, but rarely will it be as set-and-forget as a cloud provider.

Is it more expensive overall? Yes. Is it "pissed away" money? In some cases, maybe. In many, no. The ease of running and reduced upfront capex is absolutely valuable.

I used to setup a rack for a two person engineering team. It does take focus away sometimes. Particularly if the Colo lost A/C… but thankfully that’s not really an issue these days.

> this is like saying that renting is a waste of money and everyone should purchase a home

Renting is a waste of money and everyone (or at least a lot more people than at present) should own one's own home, whether on their own or via e.g. a housing cooperative.

While renting does typically cost more than owing, from a purely financial perspective, in practice you can argue that the difference is simply what you are paying the landlord for the services they are providing. The landlord is responsible for maintenance, taxes, insurance, and more. Not everybody wants to deal with those things. The landlord might be more efficient at those things too, especially in a rental apartment.

AWS might cost more but it provides a lot of benefits that are hard to assign a dollar value to.

> The landlord is responsible for maintenance, taxes, insurance, and more.

Those things are typically factored into estimates for ownership v. rental costs, and even with those factored in, renting costs more than owning. That really shouldn't be terribly surprising, either; if landlords only broke even on their rentals, then there would be no reason to be in the rental business instead of the property management business.

As some of the sibling comments have said, owning a home can be great if it's over a certain period of time and you know what you want, kind of like capacity planning. If you don't know what you need or you're not sure you're going to use it long term, renting can make sense (like the situation where AWS is a valuable use case).

If I know I'm going to be living in a city for two years, buying a home would likely be a bad idea. Sure we could talk about scenarios of renting it out and yada yada, but we're getting into corner cases in a comment section of a thread about AWS pricing :)

Right, but how many people know they're only going to be in a city for two years? Most people intend to be in a place long-term; moving is in and of itself relatively expensive (even more so the further you move) and tends to be avoided unless there's good reason to do so or unless there's no other option.

And bringing things back to AWS pricing: yeah, at first you might not know exactly what you need capacity-wise, but at some point (assuming you're actually measuring resource usage) you start to get a feel for what you need day-to-day and where things are trending. Much like with living arrangements, infrastructure hosting tends to have at least some pieces that you know you're gonna need long-term.

The more compelling reason to go with IaaS/PaaS is the convenience of not needing to run your own servers in your own rack - and it's that convenience that you're paying for, at a premium compared to hiring sysadmins. For a lot of businesses that's cost-effective, because they don't have/need enough infra to keep a sysadmin busy, but at some point that flips.

Everyone doesn't have the same goals as you and putting things in italics doesn't make you right

It ain't the italics that make me right, but the things I write :)

There was a good rent vs buy calculator I found years ago, not sure which one it was, but it doesn't even make financial sense in some scenarios, particularly for shorter terms.

> AWS is NOT cheap.

I've realised that cloud costs are a "wave". (App is app/service/business)

- cheap to run as a small app

- costly to run as a bigger app, cheaper to self-host

- cheaper than running all infra for a much bigger app

- extremely costly compared to running all infra for a much-much bigger app

- probably on par with running your own infra (but then you're getting into tens/hundreds of millions of customers)

I mean AWS optimization is a valid consultancy/self employment career; it's like tech debt in coding, you make it work first, prove that it works, get value from it, and only then look into optimizing.

Would these clients have been able to make the upfront investment to set up their own racks and hire / train the relevant staff? That's the sales pitch for AWS and other cloud providers, you can get started a lot faster, make money, only then look into optimizing.

Running your own servers is easy to underestimate. Running it with the reliability, backup and fallbacks that cloud providers offer is also easily overlooked. How much does it cost to set up a multi region cluster yourself?

That said, there are some real life examples of companies that moved away from AWS in favor of their own servers, like Dropbox which bootstrapped on AWS, then built their own eight years later (https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/15/why-dropbox-decided-to-dro...).

> you can get started a lot faster, make money, only then look into optimizing.

IME, companies often will first fall into the trap of minimum spend with AWS for larger discounts, such that even when you _do_ try to optimize things, it doesn’t matter. There is no greater disincentive than saving 5 digits per month, only to be told “thanks, but it doesn’t matter.”

Tangentially, I think the rise of cloud and SaaS to blame more than anything for the I-shaped engineer. Why bother learning anything about optimization when K8s will silently add another node to the cluster as needed? Why bother learning SQL when ORMs abound, and your Serverless DB will happily upsize to deal with your terrible schema? After all, you’re being told to ship, ship, ship, so there’s not really any time to learn those things anyway.

I simultaneously love and hate cloud providers, and am eagerly awaiting the slow but steady turn towards on-prem/colo. 37Signals has the right idea.

> 23 billon that AWS users pissed away.

How do you know it would have cost them less to hire their own teams for self-hosting?

Business transactions aren't zero sum.

How much would be pissed away on duplicating DBMS administration work?

Are we that far removed from reality to forget that one small team of DB admins can handle literally thousands of instances?

We use AWS because collectively paying AWS 23billion is stupendously cheaper than 1m users AWS having a a whole infrastructure team.

> Everything has cost and value and managing that is going to become an engineering task in the near future.

FYI: I have known people 8 years ago who already made money by optimizing people's AWS bills. "AWS expert", "AWS consultant" etc. are valid contractor titles.

You can sit here calling “profit” pissing money away until you’re on the receiving end of it. Then you’ll be going on about the value you’re providing. Stop being dramatic.

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