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Comment by ilc | Hacker News Reader

For most orgs: AWS is not overcharging IMHO.

When you look at the cost of the hardware + hosting. Yes, it certainly looks and feels that way.

But if you've dealt with corporate IT, and had to deal with 3-6 month lead times on getting hardware, or politics to get your hands on hardware to get stuff done.

AWS is cheap. It gives you velocity.

If your company is large enough that it can offer the elasticity of resources that Amazon offers or even 1/4 of it... and you have an IT org that will let it happen. Yes, AWS is a waste.

But with AWS... when a project dies, you can wipe its costs out, people won't hold onto hardware so they have hardware for the next project, etc...

Trust me. I've been IT, I can spec and build rack systems. I am a software dev. And I've been a dev most all my career.

For 90%+ of orgs... they don't have the maturity and skills to handle that type of infra without substantially distracting from their primary business.

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I find at AWS I am always wasting engineer time optimizing dumb things. Do you know how much a TB of ram costs? Or 10TB of blazing fast NVME costs? Less than $5K. How much does that cost at AWS?! This is not even considering bandwidth which AWS overcharges soo much. Yet I waste time.

Also, maintaining servers is not hard at a proper data center. It is often more hands off than the migrations cloud providers force on their customers.

Yeah. Also, to be honest, we still have process and approvals to get through to spin up AWS stuff.

It’s not like process disappears just cause you’re not on your own hardware. Infra is still its own team with its own budgets poking and prodding at every damn turn for every little thing till rejecting your requests, you escalate and then have a 4 week battle over needing the space.

Really? At my old company each division had its own budget and account and then you’d be an iam member of an account and spin up services under that account, but there’s no central authority to send a request to. There were tools to analyze underused services across all accounts (like EC2 instances constantly under 2% cpu load meaning they were flagged for downsizing if possible).

Then your company should have stayed on prem.

If you are paying the price of being on prem, which is really lack of ability to provision and de-provision infra quickly. There's little point to the cloud, unless you just have no infra to begin with (small companies).

I'm in a small firm now. I can't imagine having an approval process to spin up a few instances to run my tests and spin them down after. That'd be silly.

Getting good results on AWS/GCP is neither easy nor simple: it’s a different set of headaches.

It’s still a win for a lot of use cases and I still do it quite often, but the meme that it’s this “click and you’ve just hired the best ops team in the world to work for you” and so the 50-500% markup is actually a bargain is horseshit. A Bizon box in your living room fucks AWS up on flops/$ on most instance types and pays for itself in 30 days.

It is one of the best ops teams on Earth: but they’re working for you like the Google search team is working for the user.

The problem with using a cloud provider is that you still need to know what you're doing.

Your application isn't going to magically become HA/DR. You still have to make it that way, from your application design/coding up through the deployment.

I mean, if you're not storing your session IDs in a data store that's reachable by all the nodes behind your load balancer then no amount of infrastructure is going to save you.

A great illustration of this is the GitHub outage a few years back. They had a fairly well distributed application layer but the database topography at the time didn’t consider the failure mode, even though the application layer did.

That’s a realistic scenario no matter whether you’re bare metal, building out your own cloud, or using someone else’s. No amount of AWS/GCP/Azure/et al marketing changes that.

And when your comcast link dies, GG man. Oh, what about when you drop a drive?

Yes, you have to learn things to goto the cloud, and I won't say it is all roses, it ain't. But... AWS is less likely to fsck it up.

If you have the constant load to burn the flops 24x7x365... go for it. If you have the ops team to do it... go for it.

If you don't... take a bit of time and learn the cloud which is much easier than getting on-prem right.

Especially for smaller firms, this isn't even a close call IMHO.

Back in the day, Google was an innovator by using lots of cheap commodity servers instead of a few expensive ones and just accepting failures as a fact of life. I wonder 25% seriously whether there's an opportunity for a similar mad genius move to pay for business class fiber at a half dozen remote employee's homes across the country and just have a good replication/failover strategy. 24/7 on call isn't that big of a deal if you just have to go into your basement to swap a drive. Going to be on vacation? Don't be the primary site while you're out.

People like vast.ai are making moves in this geberal direction FWIW if you’re passionate about it.

I work in cloud and you sound like a shill.

More a realist. If you have the scale to go on prem. Do it.

Most firms don't. Or don't have the skills.

Also, the cloud can help an IT project recover from errors. Let's say, I'm about to buy 500k of hardware to setup some storage. I get my requirements, I architect it, do my design work, and then buy the hardware. I have to over provision a bit because of reality and human error... But when I discover that the requirements, shift 2mo in my project, and I've already ordered the hardware... I may be hosed.

This isn't hypothetical, this is what happens. Things evolve and shift. The cloud allows for more agility. If your firm is large enough, or has its stuff together enough, go for it on-prem.

I've got 20+ years on prem.. I've seen it fail all over. I've seen cloud be a mess too. But if you told me to clean up one. I'll take the cloud.

Anyone who thinks the blanket statement “cloud is expensive” really doesn’t know what they are talking about.

For me, I prefer hosted/cloud, preferably managed.

I’m quite capable of setting up whole server stacks. I did it for years, but I stopped, some time ago, and consider myself to be, for want of a better word, incompetent at being a modern admin.

I think I’d screw the pooch, so I prefer that someone who does it every day, handle it.

But I write Swift code, every day, so I’m not incompetent at everything.

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