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Comment by cntainer | Hacker News Reader

The magic of cloud is how quickly you can scale things up. If you're a new fast growing business it will give you a competitive edge.

If you drank to cloud kool-aid from the beginning you kind of get used to huge costs for simple services so it's easier for your brain to justify paying 10k a month for a simple web app deployed in kubernetes, using cosmos db and any other number of services.

I've seen many companies that started on the cloud and their core architecture is so interleaved with the cloud that it would a huge investment to reduce that dependency and switch.

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> The magic of cloud is how quickly you can scale things up

I see this spouted a lot, but my recent (last 6 months?) experience with AWS is that unless I pay up front to reserve a tonne of high end instances that I don’t necessarily need today, but might need tomorrow, I’m regularly running into capacity issues where I cannot spin up new instances of the metal that I want, and AWS support confirms they just don’t have the capacity unless we pay to reserve it up front.

At that point, it’s no different to running my own DC, where I already have 3 months of runway on my server pipeline anyway.

I wonder what the cause of that is? I think I've heard this sentiment elsewhere recently but I don't recall it in the past. So what's caused the capacity constraint?

The risk to Amazon of enabling you to scale up low end instances on demand is relatively low.

The risk of doing the same with high end instances is a different story.

Low risk & high margin products make for a highly profitable business. High risk and lower margin products less so.

Their target audience is people that can be equally well served by digital ocean and their ilk, but are happy to pay the Amazon premium.

It’s a good business model for Amazon, and a terrible value proposition for the customer who may not know better, and thinks they’re paying to de-risk their potential future growth requirements. The cost of migrating out then becomes prohibitive (both in technical hours and egress fees), so you like it or lump it, but either way, you likely just wait and/or pay Amazon more.

Until you can’t.

> The magic of cloud is how quickly you can scale things up. If you're a new fast growing business it will give you a competitive edge.

The magic if there is 1 is not the scale but the free credits. Startups can go years without paying and then it's all too late.

Scale is meaningless when it costs 10x more. Just have spare capacity and lots of it.

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