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Comment by pling | Hacker News Reader

It is very hard to decouple yourself from the tooling and the platform specific features. The PaaS offering literally requires half of the additional services ad the basic deployment is simple and the IaaS offering is expensive and you need the latter to decouple effectively.

Either way you also hang yourself with a vendor tied product and the ball and chain of licensing. The latter of which escalates pretty quick when your business grows.

Our 8 man startup in 2005 now spends £200k a year on licensing because we're that tied to the damn platform.

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pling, any chance to post/share how you are using the azure platform and what makes the migration hard? that would be really useful.

We're not using it other than for internal failovers. We tried to build version two of our product on it. The costs increased rapidly until it was cheaper to buy a 42U and stuff it with HP kit and pay for a fat pipe. The storage was expensive, the per transaction costs are expensive, the bandwidth is expensive, the IaaS machines are expensive and the support is expensive when it goes wrong which it does occasionally and violently.

This was all financial data aggregation and archival stuff.

In test it was 23% more expensive than our own kit over 3 years.

that's some nice info, thanks for sharing pling. It makes me curious to try and compare costs with other IaaS platforms.

I would do. There's a sweet spot somewhere and Azure isn't it.

Don't forget to also compare the costs to doing in-house hosting. The cost effectiveness of any platform is dependent on how you use it, and (as pling discovered) a cloud host isn't necessarily the best option.

I agree with that, although I believe that it heavily depends on where on your product roadmap you are. For early stage MVPs where you care for quick validation, I believe that in-house hosting is not a very good option, maybe a PaaS environment is more suitable for these cases, e.g. Heroku. But in any case, I think that everything is related to the product, the team and what you are trying to achieve. Of course in every iteration you should re-evaluate your strategies.

I agree completely. It's important to weigh all the options, and include issues like vender lock-in, SLA and future requirements.

Can you break down that 200k in cost? That seems pretty high unless you are a fairly popular.

In order of cost: SQL Server, MSDN, Windows Server, Office.

We got utterly raped by the SQL 2012 upgrade with the core licensing changes as we have a few 48 core machines. (enough to make us consider PostgreSQL as a serious option now)

We're not public facing either.

That makes sense -- although now I'm more interested in what a non-public facing 8 person startup with a few 48 core machines that can afford 200k in licenses is doing!!!

We're a chunk of glue that aggregates and monitors financial data. Not related to trading and not real time.

We're basically the people who say 'it was him' when someone fucks up.

Please don't use the R word, which is so deeply emotive and meaningful, in such an inappropriate context.

I think it was appropriate. We were violated forcibly without consent or warning.

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