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Comment by 999900000999 | Hacker News Reader

That was the promise of "The Cloud".

Data centers are big and scary, no body wanted to run their own. The hypothetical cost savings of firing half the IT department was too good to pass up.

AWS even offered some credits to get started, first hit's free.

Next thing you know your AWS spend is out if control. It just keeps growing and growing and growing. Instead of writing better software, which might slow down development, just spend more money.

Ultimately in most cases it's cheaper in the short term to give AWS more money.

Apart of me wants to do a 5$ VPS challenge. How many users can you serve with 5$ per month. Maybe you actually need to understand what your server is doing ?

I'm talking non sense, I know.

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I work for a big org. We’re about to deploy a small grafana setup for monitoring some test environments. Double digit spend per month, maximum. It’s pretty close to impossible to get IT, infosec, purchasing and finance to agree to this in a period of time that I’ll still be employed (and I’m not planning on leaving).

But, on the AWS marketplace I can click a button, a line item is added to our bill, and infosec are happy because it’s got the AWS checkmark beside it. Doesn’t matter what it costs, as long it goes through the catalog.

That’s why big companies use AWS.

At my last job, I worked for a vc backed startup. I reached out to our fund, and they put us in touch with AWS, who gave us $100k in credits after a courtesy phone call.

That’s why startups use AWS

> Instead of writing better software, which might slow down development, just spend more money.

Except this is unironically a great value proposition.

We are throwing everything under the bus, including the user's battery, CPU, memory, bandwidth, the company's cloud costs and energy usage, just so developers can crap out software slightly faster.

We are providing users with valuable features at a faster rate, saving them and us time, which is a far more valuable asset than "the user's battery, CPU, memory, bandwidth, the company's cloud costs and energy usage".

Doing 'the cloud' right at scale has to involve running your own cloud at some point. We should not pollute the good ideas around API-delivered infrastructure with the more questionable idea of outsourcing your infrastructuree.

OpenStack has been around 15 years powering this idea at scale for huge organizatons, including Wal-Mart, Verizon, Blizzard and more.

Not really. I run several web applications on one 15$ VPS. Although the user count is <5. But I think it would need quite a lot of users for the resource usage to go up to a critical level.

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