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Comment by jdub | Hacker News Reader

Are there tens of regions around the world? Are there multiple AZs within a region that are single-digit milliseconds apart? Can I autoscale? Is there a managed load balancer? Do I have to manage my own database instances and availability? Do I have access to hundreds of other services for things that I don't want to spend time managing myself?

Aren't we years beyond the 1:1 cost comparison for a single server argument?

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No, almost no-one needs any of that. The depressing amount of money that goes to AWS for little reason but 'because it's the safe choice and everyone does it' is pretty amazing. In tech/programming we often say 'use the right tool for the job' and yet everyone reaches for the hammer that is AWS when hosting is mentioned.

Every company I've worked for in the last ten years has needed all of the above, and I like to work for small companies (fewer than 100 people). Only in the last couple of years have I had any interest or need to branch out to the other clouds, largely because they're doing specific things really well.

I wanted to write the same. One server in my basement never compares to a highly-available, compliant and secure infrastructure, surrounded by managed services. It's like complaining that taxis are more expensive than driving your own car.

Every infrastructure is as secure as you configure it to be without bugs. Not that AWS doesn't allow for secure infastructure and you're basement is secure by default, but as a consultant I see clients when I ask them about security saying "We're secure because we use AWS.".

One should definitely not default into "we're secure because we use AWS". But let's be honest, how many servers in the basement feature video surveillance? How many destroy their hard disks securely?

An honest statement would be "we reduced our burden of security by building on top of AWS".

Yeah! The amount of toil and burden AWS removes or reduces for me across the board (security, managed services, running multiple datacentres and everything necessary to do so…) means I can work on vastly more valuable things. Which more than makes up for the price.

The cost of 1 server is not a sufficient metric of value.

Not to counter your point, but what I've learned and was suprised how cheap it is to letting a company destroy your harddisks and USB sticks - at least in Germany.

Tell that to Capital One.

YAGNI applies extremely heavily to most of those concerns. Pre-traction startups are wasting money they don't have, just to future-proof their application.

The question is wether that is worth the lock in.

I worked at a job that had a multi year contract with a hosting company. We paid eight figures annually to lease MIPS on a mainframe.

That’s vendor lock in. AWS “lock in” isn’t, it’s “I could terminate for convenience any day I wanted to, but the ROI isn’t there”.

With cloud providers either you use their proprietary services and thus end up with code that runs only in their cloud. Just like with MIPS code that runs only on MIPS. Only that you probably can more easily port code to another CPU architecture.

Not MIPS the RISC CPU arch / vendor and embedded survivor, but IBM MIPS, the only feature added to brilliant hardware designed to turn customers away, e.g. :

"Turning our attention back to IBM’s announcement, this new server offers five hardware models and well over 250+ unique software capacity settings, providing a highly granular and scalable system. The base single-engine speed of 98 MIPS is found on the A01; the same full speed unit (Z01) climbs to 1761 MIPs, up from 1570 MIPs on the prior generation"

From : https://www.evolvingsol.com/2020/04/14/ibmz15-mainframe/

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