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Comment by bfeynman | Hacker News Reader

despite what everyone thinks that doing things locally is cheaper, if you're running a business and allocating money towards headcount and benefits plus additional risk of maintaining team it rarely makes sense. HN is full of people who run a hobby server and think that a fortune 500 should manage its own PostGres

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You still need headcount to manage systems on AWS. And not really fewer then if you would run them locally.

Source: managed systems locally, am now managing systems on AWS

if you think you need more headcount to do things on cloud you're doing it wrong. Just the identity setup alone needs multiple people, and that's almost a full time job for them. On cloud you don't have to worry about that at all, and it comes with full auditibility and compliance.

Cloud requires a giant team of people working on cost management for any none trivial project. You ain't saving headcount.

Yeah that’s the sales pitch. As soon as reality sets in and you need to integrate with an existing identity service for example, things can get pretty complex quickly.

AWS & Co. use cases always look nice on paper, in reality it’s often not as easy as advertised.

Surely the cloud managed solution reduces the amount of custom magic that I have to put into place to keep things running. Everything is standardized & documented. There is a huge community to turn to if help is needed.

And very less work is required if I get hit by a bus and someone else is now the owner of the huge system that I previously owned.

It is standardized and documented if you DO document it and properly use IaC like CloudFormation or Terraform. But you can absolutely have people do ad-hoc changes in AWS that are not gonna be reproducible.

Also, all of your points apply to non-cloud systems too.

but you can run kubernetes on bare metal

The performance benefits of a real DB server with local NVME and a TB+ of ram can save TONS of engineering effort/time. I have ran 10TB+ PostgreSQL DBs in both the cloud and bare metal and TBH, in terms of time required to maintain, there isn't a huge difference once you move beyond what RDS can do.

That being said, if RDS can do what you need USE IT. You can always migrate later and it will save you the need to hire someone who really knows postgres.

Everyone loves to run their own server in the garage until they’re on vacation in Thailand and the power goes out back home.

I actually saw a very impressive solution to that problem on an indie hacker forum recently. And wow could that person save effort with even just a $5/mo VPS.

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