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> Cloud is great if your workload is variable and erratic Or if you're just constantly iterating on a large product with many engineers. Those engineers' salar

> Cloud is great if your workload is variable and erratic Or if you're just constantly iterating on a large product with many engineers. Those engineers' salaries almost always outweigh all of your cloud costs and so making them productive is cost effective. Things like SNS/SQS/S3/VPC/ELB/etc. save you countless hours and often make up for the increased cloud costs with increased developer productivity.

YarickR2 6y ago
No they don't . Things you mentioned are very easy to deploy on-premises, and they won't take more than one man month to deploy and maintain.
- kelnos 6y ago
  That's an incredibly naive assessment and is absolutely not true in practice, except for perhaps for some orgs where the stars just happen to align to make that a reality. Most places heavily build "cloud" into their frameworks, tooling, hiring, and, well, everything. Even just swapping out a single hosted/managed component (as my company did a few years ago, replacing Kinesis with Kafka) can require a lot of up-front work[0] and on-going maintenance. [0] Especially if you're already in production with the thing you want to replace, and want to transition without downtime for your customers.
- RhodesianHunter 6y ago
  I love that you think mature products that took teams of highly skilled people at Amazon years to refine can just be slapped together in a month in your colo. What a joke.
dahfizz 6y ago
> Those engineers' salaries almost always outweigh all of your cloud costs I think there is a divide here. Most people in this thread that mention cost as an issue are running some serious gear, and that does not come cheap. Your parent is running 70 servers plus some serious networking equipment, which is easily a couple million dollars. And he said that a cloud provider would 10x that cost. If all you need is a little VM to run a website, cloud hosting is cheap. If you are running real infrastructure, a couple hours of developer time will never out-weight the astronomical costs of cloud hosting.
- kelnos 6y ago
  Not sure that's universally true. We have probably tens of thousands of EC2 instances in our infra right now. Just the cost alone to build out on-prem infra and migrate things over would likely wipe out a half-decade or more of cost savings. And in the meantime our shift in focus would hurt our market position. If we'd started in the beginning (11 or 12 years ago) with our own infra, I imagine our recurring infra costs would be lower right now, but I also suspect that our 3-person founding team would have failed to produce an MVP before their initial time and money ran out. If I were starting a company now, I'd probably do things in a more "platform agnostic" way such that a cloud->on-prem migration might be easier. But I still never expect it'd be easy.
  - pvorb 6y ago
    If you implement things in a cloud agnostic way you can also save a lot by choosing a traditional webhoster/server hoster. If you want your product to be cloud agnostic, you lose almost every advantage of the cloud. That's the whole problem why we haven't seen a competitive reduction in prices between cloud providers, yet.
- Aeolun 6y ago
  > If you are running real infrastructure, a couple hours of developer time will never out-weight the astronomical costs of cloud hosting. Over time, buying things yourself will always win out on cloud architecture, or the cloud business would be bankrupt.
  - waterhouse 6y ago
    It would be theoretically possible for cloud providers, specializing in what they do, to gain from economies of scale of various sorts (having their own large purpose-built datacenters, needing less total redundant equipment to have the same replacement speed, having local servers in all parts of the world, being able to use nighttime idle cycles in servers in one part of the world for daytime customers on the other side), which could theoretically yield savings greater than the profit margin that they charge. Not saying this is what happens in practice.
pmlnr 6y ago
Riiight, because you don't need people to keep the cloud stuff configured and working /s

YarickR2 6y ago

No they don't . Things you mentioned are very easy to deploy on-premises, and they won't take more than one man month to deploy and maintain.

kelnos 6y ago
That's an incredibly naive assessment and is absolutely not true in practice, except for perhaps for some orgs where the stars just happen to align to make that a reality. Most places heavily build "cloud" into their frameworks, tooling, hiring, and, well, everything. Even just swapping out a single hosted/managed component (as my company did a few years ago, replacing Kinesis with Kafka) can require a lot of up-front work[0] and on-going maintenance. [0] Especially if you're already in production with the thing you want to replace, and want to transition without downtime for your customers.
RhodesianHunter 6y ago
I love that you think mature products that took teams of highly skilled people at Amazon years to refine can just be slapped together in a month in your colo. What a joke.

dahfizz 6y ago

> Those engineers' salaries almost always outweigh all of your cloud costs I think there is a divide here. Most people in this thread that mention cost as an issue are running some serious gear, and that does not come cheap. Your parent is running 70 servers plus some serious networking equipment, which is easily a couple million dollars. And he said that a cloud provider would 10x that cost. If all you need is a little VM to run a website, cloud hosting is cheap. If you are running real infrastructure, a couple hours of developer time will never out-weight the astronomical costs of cloud hosting.

kelnos 6y ago
Not sure that's universally true. We have probably tens of thousands of EC2 instances in our infra right now. Just the cost alone to build out on-prem infra and migrate things over would likely wipe out a half-decade or more of cost savings. And in the meantime our shift in focus would hurt our market position. If we'd started in the beginning (11 or 12 years ago) with our own infra, I imagine our recurring infra costs would be lower right now, but I also suspect that our 3-person founding team would have failed to produce an MVP before their initial time and money ran out. If I were starting a company now, I'd probably do things in a more "platform agnostic" way such that a cloud->on-prem migration might be easier. But I still never expect it'd be easy.
- pvorb 6y ago
  If you implement things in a cloud agnostic way you can also save a lot by choosing a traditional webhoster/server hoster. If you want your product to be cloud agnostic, you lose almost every advantage of the cloud. That's the whole problem why we haven't seen a competitive reduction in prices between cloud providers, yet.
Aeolun 6y ago
> If you are running real infrastructure, a couple hours of developer time will never out-weight the astronomical costs of cloud hosting. Over time, buying things yourself will always win out on cloud architecture, or the cloud business would be bankrupt.
- waterhouse 6y ago
  It would be theoretically possible for cloud providers, specializing in what they do, to gain from economies of scale of various sorts (having their own large purpose-built datacenters, needing less total redundant equipment to have the same replacement speed, having local servers in all parts of the world, being able to use nighttime idle cycles in servers in one part of the world for daytime customers on the other side), which could theoretically yield savings greater than the profit margin that they charge. Not saying this is what happens in practice.

pmlnr 6y ago

Riiight, because you don't need people to keep the cloud stuff configured and working /s