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Comment by anymouse123456 | Hacker News Reader

I agree, this is a common story and your point stands for some significant percentage of the complaints.

It should be made clear though, that some of us helped spend many millions in obviously wasteful on-prem infra in the nineties, bought into AWS wholeheartedly when it came out, fought through the ignorance, developed the ability to deliver highly scaled applications on the platform over many years and at least some of us still carry those same beliefs:

- It's more complicated than it needs to be

- It's more expensive than it should be

- Pricing is more opaque than it should be

Meanwhile, the cost of other options (including self-managed, on-prem infra) has fallen massively since those early days of AWS.

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Prior to the RAM crunch you could buy 4 or 5 servers ~50k that would be more than capable to handle many enterprises needs. The thing is the industry has sorta lost the skill set to host and maintain them. The people who can do this still exist of course but they are outnumbered by the YAML jockeys 10 to 1.

There are also other things that the cloud hides in its price as well. Redundant networking, provisioning, rack space, internet connections, firewalls, UPS backup, power usage.

Still I think a lot of startups would benefit from hosting their own stuff if they intend to be a long term business instead of just shooting their shot and hoping to be acquired.

No, you misunderstand, it's not that we lack the knowledge or skills (we don't!) it's that the backbones and pipelines all converge on these hyperscalers and that's where you get the best throughput and least latency.

I clearly remember having a discussion with a very VERY large company I worked for at the time about getting some NVidia hardware for our own enterprise data centers and they flat out refused. Now, they have lost any advantage they could have had.

The issue with AWS is that they started off cheap, easy, simple and grew into an enterprise mess complete with opaque pricing. That's an issue. The complexity itself has created a whole new lane of work for the SRE where they can specialize in AWS and not do anything else. It's grown beyond just a cloud provider. People who are still expecting a cloud provider are going to be sour about it.

This is borne out by the fact that there are alternatives that are:

- dramatically simpler

- cheaper

- easier to budget

while retaining the scale-on-demand and hide-the-actual-hardware properties that the industry jumped for joy at. What they don't have is the nobody-got-fired-for-rearchitecting-to-aws bit.

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