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>20% minimum and typically much higher if you know how to negotiate when purchasing your on-prem gear. A 20% premium on a $10k/mo server bill is an incredibly

>20% minimum and typically much higher if you know how to negotiate when purchasing your on-prem gear. A 20% premium on a $10k/mo server bill is an incredibly small premium to pay versus a single FTE.

tw04 6y ago
I have yet to move a single customer to Amazon that fired the FTE who was managing on-prem infrastructure and chalked it up to a cost-savings move. . The idea of cutting headcount is a fallacy. In small shops the guy that was managing on-prem infrastructure is now doing that (because it turns out you still need switches and phones and routers and firewalls even if you host things in AWS) as well as managing the AWS infrastructure. In large shops you're typically replacing "cheap" headcount (the guy who racked servers) with someone significantly more expensive (a team of cloud architects).
- x0x0 6y ago
  We're a small company who avoided the hire. And we don't bother with a firewall at our office -- the only things on the office network are laptops, phones, printers, and sonos. Basically, if you model senior eng time as $5k/week -- not even counting the opportunity cost -- you'll understand why AWS. While I definitely think AWS is very expensive for the servers, they are not overall expensive. Again, setting up CloudWatch in an afternoon or dumping tons of heterogenous logs into S3 and querying them with Athena or spinning up full environment stacks (front end pool, back end pool, load balancers, databases, vpcs, vpns, etc) is an enormous cost savings vs finding, installing, configuring, and maintaining batches of software to do the same. edit: pay an eng $180k. Fully loaded, you're looking at $220k plus. Add in either recruiting time or a recruiting fee that probably runs us $2k/mo amortized over the first year on the low end. Add in the fact that the first 6 weeks weren't super productive, and also absorbed tons of time from other SE to get this person up to speed. Add in PM time bringing this person up to speed on our product. Yup, $5k/week.
  - hobby-coder-guy 6y ago
    $5k per week?
  - vishnugupta 6y ago
    On top of that add the opportunity cost of spending all that time managing/setting on prem infrastructure Vs solving business problems....there’s a good reason AWS and the likes have millions of customers today.
  - vidarh 6y ago
    Or, you know, you could have brought in a consultant part time. If you're small enough that you can handle an AWS setup without someone full time, you could run on a managed hosting setup for less including an external consultant charging ridiculous hourly rates. Clients on AWS were always my best ones, because they were used to paying so much over the odds I could set my rates much higher.
    - AtlasBarfed 6y ago
      Yeah, I wanted an extra person on our desperately understaffed team, so I proposed I cut about a million bucks of spending year-on-year from AWS. They didn't want to increase the head count. The AWS spend was a different silo/team/contract. Corporate accounting is insane. It almost smelled like "well, we negotiated this great AWS discount, so it doesn't bother us that we are spending an extra million. We're getting it at a DISCOUNT!" Is there some MBA trend where every headcount is some ticking time bomb of liability that is 10x worse than their yearly salary? You spend 150k on servers, they don't improve over a year. You spend 150k on a decent employee, not even rockstar ninja 100xer, and they will deliver useful, although sometimes hidden, productivity and optimization.
throwaway894345 6y ago
It's such a meme on this site to compare costs of AWS to hardware costs as though the hardware operates itself. I'm sure there are many cases in which onprem actually is a better value proposition than AWS, and I would find it much more interesting if we talked about when to go with AWS vs onprem, but instead we try to make these silly comparisons about the upfront cost of a server blade vs an EC2 instance.
- vidarh 6y ago
  I've done operations stuff for ~25 years now. I've used AWS since it launched. I've done devops consulting for years. I've yet to see an AWS deployment be competitive on cost with onprem or managed hosting. In fact, I used to make good money helping people cut costs by moving off AWS. That includes paying more for devops, because AWS is incredibly complicated, and most people struggle to get it set up well. There are valid reasons to pick AWS. Cost is not one of them.
  - throwaway894345 6y ago
    Cool, this is the stuff that interests me. Comparing the nominal cost of hardware with the nominal AWS costs is boring.
    - thu2111 6y ago
      Why? If the primary benefit you're getting from the cloud is VMs, it's valid to compare to hardware. The overhead of bare metal on top of cloud VMs is basically knowing how to handle RAID and set up load balancing.
      - throwaway894345 6y ago
        VMs are certainly not the primary benefit of the cloud; cloud providers offer many services in addition to VM orchestration, but that hardly matters because your own example is illustrative of your error: > The overhead of bare metal on top of cloud VMs is basically knowing how to handle RAID and set up load balancing. This implies human beings to handle raid and set up load balancing, which suggests that you need to compare the cost of cloud providers with the cost of hardware and the cost of those engineering resources. In addition to RAID and load balancing, most organizations/applications also need networking (good luck balancing load without a network), databases (including backup management), TLS, DNS, access management, etc, etc. All of this takes humans to build and operate. AWS services do a lot of this for you. In the on-prem world, you have to build (or buy/integrate) this yourself, but that's not free so you have to account for that cost in your comparison. You can still make the argument that on-prem is a better value proposition when accounting for the total cost of ownership, but that's a different argument than those which ignore engineering costs altogether.
freeone3000 6y ago
If you don't have an FTE in charge of servers, who's managing AWS? If you leave it up to the individual developers you end up with an overcosted mess.

tw04 6y ago

I have yet to move a single customer to Amazon that fired the FTE who was managing on-prem infrastructure and chalked it up to a cost-savings move. . The idea of cutting headcount is a fallacy. In small shops the guy that was managing on-prem infrastructure is now doing that (because it turns out you still need switches and phones and routers and firewalls even if you host things in AWS) as well as managing the AWS infrastructure. In large shops you're typically replacing "cheap" headcount (the guy who racked servers) with someone significantly more expensive (a team of cloud architects).

x0x0 6y ago
We're a small company who avoided the hire. And we don't bother with a firewall at our office -- the only things on the office network are laptops, phones, printers, and sonos. Basically, if you model senior eng time as $5k/week -- not even counting the opportunity cost -- you'll understand why AWS. While I definitely think AWS is very expensive for the servers, they are not overall expensive. Again, setting up CloudWatch in an afternoon or dumping tons of heterogenous logs into S3 and querying them with Athena or spinning up full environment stacks (front end pool, back end pool, load balancers, databases, vpcs, vpns, etc) is an enormous cost savings vs finding, installing, configuring, and maintaining batches of software to do the same. edit: pay an eng $180k. Fully loaded, you're looking at $220k plus. Add in either recruiting time or a recruiting fee that probably runs us $2k/mo amortized over the first year on the low end. Add in the fact that the first 6 weeks weren't super productive, and also absorbed tons of time from other SE to get this person up to speed. Add in PM time bringing this person up to speed on our product. Yup, $5k/week.
- hobby-coder-guy 6y ago
  $5k per week?
- vishnugupta 6y ago
  On top of that add the opportunity cost of spending all that time managing/setting on prem infrastructure Vs solving business problems....there’s a good reason AWS and the likes have millions of customers today.
- vidarh 6y ago
  Or, you know, you could have brought in a consultant part time. If you're small enough that you can handle an AWS setup without someone full time, you could run on a managed hosting setup for less including an external consultant charging ridiculous hourly rates. Clients on AWS were always my best ones, because they were used to paying so much over the odds I could set my rates much higher.
  - AtlasBarfed 6y ago
    Yeah, I wanted an extra person on our desperately understaffed team, so I proposed I cut about a million bucks of spending year-on-year from AWS. They didn't want to increase the head count. The AWS spend was a different silo/team/contract. Corporate accounting is insane. It almost smelled like "well, we negotiated this great AWS discount, so it doesn't bother us that we are spending an extra million. We're getting it at a DISCOUNT!" Is there some MBA trend where every headcount is some ticking time bomb of liability that is 10x worse than their yearly salary? You spend 150k on servers, they don't improve over a year. You spend 150k on a decent employee, not even rockstar ninja 100xer, and they will deliver useful, although sometimes hidden, productivity and optimization.

throwaway894345 6y ago

It's such a meme on this site to compare costs of AWS to hardware costs as though the hardware operates itself. I'm sure there are many cases in which onprem actually is a better value proposition than AWS, and I would find it much more interesting if we talked about when to go with AWS vs onprem, but instead we try to make these silly comparisons about the upfront cost of a server blade vs an EC2 instance.

vidarh 6y ago
I've done operations stuff for ~25 years now. I've used AWS since it launched. I've done devops consulting for years. I've yet to see an AWS deployment be competitive on cost with onprem or managed hosting. In fact, I used to make good money helping people cut costs by moving off AWS. That includes paying more for devops, because AWS is incredibly complicated, and most people struggle to get it set up well. There are valid reasons to pick AWS. Cost is not one of them.
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  Cool, this is the stuff that interests me. Comparing the nominal cost of hardware with the nominal AWS costs is boring.
  - thu2111 6y ago
    Why? If the primary benefit you're getting from the cloud is VMs, it's valid to compare to hardware. The overhead of bare metal on top of cloud VMs is basically knowing how to handle RAID and set up load balancing.
    - throwaway894345 6y ago
      VMs are certainly not the primary benefit of the cloud; cloud providers offer many services in addition to VM orchestration, but that hardly matters because your own example is illustrative of your error: > The overhead of bare metal on top of cloud VMs is basically knowing how to handle RAID and set up load balancing. This implies human beings to handle raid and set up load balancing, which suggests that you need to compare the cost of cloud providers with the cost of hardware and the cost of those engineering resources. In addition to RAID and load balancing, most organizations/applications also need networking (good luck balancing load without a network), databases (including backup management), TLS, DNS, access management, etc, etc. All of this takes humans to build and operate. AWS services do a lot of this for you. In the on-prem world, you have to build (or buy/integrate) this yourself, but that's not free so you have to account for that cost in your comparison. You can still make the argument that on-prem is a better value proposition when accounting for the total cost of ownership, but that's a different argument than those which ignore engineering costs altogether.

freeone3000 6y ago

If you don't have an FTE in charge of servers, who's managing AWS? If you leave it up to the individual developers you end up with an overcosted mess.