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Comment by Terretta | Hacker News Reader

Router? Gateway? Firewall? Network Access Control? VLANs? Ability to manage all this through declarative version controlled code w/ rollback?

The costs of doing those (well) yourself are not cheap.

Getting them from a provider that's certified to do them well while giving you software control also isn't cheap.

You're comparing cost of gas per gallon to to expense of miles driven per gallon. Pretty sure on your IRS or corporate expense report those aren't the same.

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Heck, even the cost of creating and maintaining documentation for the services has to be enormous. The first time I worked with the AWS IoT services I was extremely impressed by the breadth, depth, and quality of the documentation, and it all seemed up-to-date: the screenshots showed the same interfaces I was seeing, and even documentation on small features or use-cases seemed to be accurate and current.

When you put it all together, you're not paying for bandwidth, you're paying for the power and convenience of a robust, high-quality, high-availability solution that provides extraordinary benefits when looked at holistically.

Exactly. Olive Garden is $10 for a pasta plate. I could have bought the ingredients for less than $2.

It takes times and skill to turn the ingredients into something useful.

Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are IaaS/PaaS, not ISPs.

Want to disrupt the restaurant industry?

Sell food at cost!

Restaurants operate on pretty thin margins. You're confusing the cost of raw materials with the cost of prepared and served meals.

Also, employees? These are services that are actively maintained and developed."Alternative 1 – Colocation in a Data Center" doesn't include the 100k/yr you'll have to pay an engineer to manage that hardware.

Most enterprises, you're right. I left people off because you can handle a dozen or more DCs with only a couple engineers if you assume (design for) frequent component failure and only do a site visit/decomm/install once or twice a year.

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