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Comment by wolco2 | Hacker News Reader

You are probably an expert in your area but the original poster was talking about much smaller shops. That's the point being missed for every multi-million dollar spender there are thousands of smaller projects paying 10x the cost because they think they will be you one day and it is cheaper to build on that stack from day one.

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Yeah, I'm saying that you can use this cost effectively at smaller places too.

When I think of my core Terraform infrastructure that I can spin up for any project, the only resource with a recurring AWS/Google/Azure cost is NAT Gateways. You can get very cost-competitive with the instances themselves with reservations and/or spot, depending on your architecture. The costs of the big clouds and the small ones is basically the same here.

The way the cost balloons out of control for most companies is for things like S3 access (applications that HEAD the bucket every 60 seconds and hit the API request cash register), or managed services like EKS, Amazon ElasticSearch, etc. It's in the "oh I don't have to learn how to manage X application" where cloud gets expensive.

Smaller providers solve that problem by not even giving you that option. It's not that AWS is expensive, it's that they give you rope to hang yourself with.

> "they give you rope to hang yourself with."

That's not a triviality - C++ has the same problem, if you have a single ezpert individual it's great, but if you have a team, and some are very green, it will be a nightmare.

Here we are in agreement.

Thing is though, people who well-understand AWS/Azure/Google are plentiful (but expensive) in the industry at this point.

Small startups can't afford to have junior talent.

Small startups use junior talent for most services. They are not hiring the best hr team, marketing, sales and development. They don't have unless amount of money. They will pick one or two areas where they have an advantage and hire a strong person or two.

I think we have wildly different expectations of the scale of "small startups".

If you can afford to full-time hire an entire hr team, an entire marketing team, an entire sales team and an entire engineering org, then you're able to pay an AWS bill.

Maybe not after paying that team.

Small startups have less than 2 million and usually a 16-24 cash or bust cycle. If they are hiring teams of people they are not a small startup.

If you are not bring in more cash than your aws bill that's a problem.

Some organisations seem plain unwilling to pay that kind of money.

So they pay far more for the mess/waste/damage, but that somehow doesn't matter to them. Not just startups, some big corporates too.

Except that in smaller places time is of the essence I we don't have enough to learn the full extent of AWS and I'll save my time and money by using a droplet.

Learning AWS does have a cost. Money I'd rather spend on learning and mastering standard, open and portable systems.

> Money I'd rather spend on learning and mastering standard, open and portable systems.

That's where Terraform comes in.

You still have to learn Terraform though, and have the time to set up a full config. Might not be worth it for a small shop

And I'm learning it, to set up my dedicated instance using open protocols and standards. Your argument is moot.

> That's where Terraform comes in.

...and CloudFormation, and SAM, and CDK, and...

Terraform works with everything, everywhere.

CDK gives you a TypeScript/JavaScript/Python/Java dependency.

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