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The hubris of HN posters has no bounds. I’m sure that tweet gave you all you need to know to contradict the insiders responsible for making multi-billion dollar

The hubris of HN posters has no bounds. I’m sure that tweet gave you all you need to know to contradict the insiders responsible for making multi-billion dollar decisions… It’s probably the case that they’re all dumb, and the Internet rando has the absolutely guaranteed answer.

Nextgrid 5y ago
WeWork is proof that people making multi-billion dollar decisions aren’t always smart, and that’s even in a somewhat less volatile sector. When it comes to tech and the cloud hype I bet it’s even worse.
otabdeveloper4 5y ago
More middle men means more expensive. Regardless of what you think, you can't cheat the laws of conservation, they're built into the physical structure of our universe. AWS is a middle man in the hosting business. Sometimes it's okay, but you can't cheat the fact that Amazon has to take their cut. (This might change in the future when FAANG privatizes the global Internet for their own use, but we're not there yet today.)
- agentofoblivion 5y ago
  And Toyota is a middleman between you and the raw materials to build a car. I guess it’s obvious that you can build a car cheaper than Toyota? How do the economies of scale fit into this false equivalency of a physics analogy?
  - otabdeveloper4 5y ago
    No, this is the wrong analogy. Amazon's added value is in bundling open source tools and in provisioning and autoscaling. They don't make hardware, they don't generate electricity, they're not an ISP. They outsource the actual hosting part to other people. If you just want to host stuff you can cut out the AWS middleman and rent a data center location for much cheaper. (Like, 4-5 or even 10 times cheaper.) And yes, as a programmer/devops/sysadmin thinking about provisioning, autoscaling and packaging is your job. And yes, you absolutely can do it more efficiently than Amazon, because economies of scale don't apply to IT human resources. (Software projects don't become cheaper to make when you hire more programmers, quite the opposite, in fact.)

Nextgrid 5y ago

WeWork is proof that people making multi-billion dollar decisions aren’t always smart, and that’s even in a somewhat less volatile sector. When it comes to tech and the cloud hype I bet it’s even worse.

otabdeveloper4 5y ago

More middle men means more expensive. Regardless of what you think, you can't cheat the laws of conservation, they're built into the physical structure of our universe. AWS is a middle man in the hosting business. Sometimes it's okay, but you can't cheat the fact that Amazon has to take their cut. (This might change in the future when FAANG privatizes the global Internet for their own use, but we're not there yet today.)

agentofoblivion 5y ago
And Toyota is a middleman between you and the raw materials to build a car. I guess it’s obvious that you can build a car cheaper than Toyota? How do the economies of scale fit into this false equivalency of a physics analogy?
- otabdeveloper4 5y ago
  No, this is the wrong analogy. Amazon's added value is in bundling open source tools and in provisioning and autoscaling. They don't make hardware, they don't generate electricity, they're not an ISP. They outsource the actual hosting part to other people. If you just want to host stuff you can cut out the AWS middleman and rent a data center location for much cheaper. (Like, 4-5 or even 10 times cheaper.) And yes, as a programmer/devops/sysadmin thinking about provisioning, autoscaling and packaging is your job. And yes, you absolutely can do it more efficiently than Amazon, because economies of scale don't apply to IT human resources. (Software projects don't become cheaper to make when you hire more programmers, quite the opposite, in fact.)