Also: free cloud credits. Don't underestimate that. I know of two startups (one that I work at). Both are hooked on the cloud, albeit one has an insane cloud bi

Also: free cloud credits. Don't underestimate that. I know of two startups (one that I work at). Both are hooked on the cloud, albeit one has an insane cloud bill and one has a very reasonable bill. The reason in both cases is MSFT/AWS gave them massive up front "free" credits, which meant there was no incentive to impose internal controls on usage or put in place a culture of conservation. AWS doesn't think twice before dropping $20k on cloud credits to anyone who wrote a mobile app. At the company with the unreasonable bill, it's not even a SaaS provider. It literally just runs a few very low traffic websites for user manuals, some CI boxes and some marketing sites. The entire thing could be run off three or four dedicated boxes 95% of which would be CI, I'm sure of it. Yet this firm spends several tech salaries worth of money on Azure every quarter. The bill is eyebleeding. The problem is everyone who wanted one got a VM. You got VMs being used for nothing except running a single test program that the owner then forgot about. People used expensive hosted cloud services instead of installing Postgres because "their time is more valuable" etc. Free credits created a culture in which the company just institutionally forgot that servers cost money. When the free credits ran out it was invisible to the engineers using the services and simply became another (opaque) line item for accountants to worry about the burn rate. In the rare cases engineers decided to "optimise" they did it by spending lots of time and effort on using Kubernetes so stuff would scale down at night. There was an abortive attempt to move off the cloud. This was unfortunately stymied by incompetence by both the firm and the chosen hosting provider. It got some boxes from OVH and then didn't pay the bills for them, so the boxes were simply yanked and deleted. All the setup time was lost. In another case OVH allocated machines in datacenters that were far apart but they needed to be close together. In another case the machines were delivered but the hardware on one was faulty. Of course this stuff is a one-time hit and avoidable with non-broken processes, but it empowers those who just want to keep learning Azure/Kubernetes/Docker so they can put it on their CV. The other firm is much smaller and has much more reasonable costs, they also get more for it (e.g. use Heroku which automates a lot of stuff). Having observed these two different companies, I resolved up front that if/when I go back to running my own business I will not use cloud services, even if they offer free credits. I'll be taking pride in finding ways to drive server costs down as far as possible. Perhaps even hosting non-HA-required servers at my home given we have duplex gigabit fiber now. Yes, my time is valuable and all that, but establishing a culture up front in which people use the resources they need and not more is even more valuable.