Good info. You are right, AWS can cost more, but I disagree with "always". I run my personal website for $15/year, and most of that is the domain. I would say

Good info. You are right, AWS can cost more, but I disagree with "always". I run my personal website for $15/year, and most of that is the domain. I would say: if you're trying to list and shift to AWS, you're doing it wrong, and it will always cost more. You also can't really fire many people aside from pure network guys. Server admins will still be needed for the virtual servers. If you take the opportunity to redesign, you can realize cost savings. I still advocate avoiding layoffs, because you can retrain competent ops people to support the new infrastructure. The grizzled old guys that have trouble adapting are still usefull because chances are high you are not fully serverless within 3-5 years after a lift and shift. As you become more familiar, you realize the tweaks that can be made to save money. We used to spend $600/month on 3-4 concurrent CICD workers. We swapped to docker-machine Spot-based CICD and spend $100-140/month for 12+ concurrent workers (we started at 6 and keep raising this number because the costs simply are so small) Our front end is all static files (JS driven API calls). The $100/month server is now under $5 month for S3+CloudFront. So I agree, AWS always costs more if you are trying to replicate a physical data center and ignore all the possibilities for improvement... But with slight tweaks (even starting with auto scaling.. or even more simply, timed lambdas to turn on/off servers overnight), you can reduce costs. Migrating to containers is also a huge cost savings, since you can pack more work into fewer servers without worrying about as much (I lived the nightmare of virtualenv's and managing 12 apps on 1 server.. I prefer containers now as an ops guy)