> In most cases, it's only cheaper if you value engineering time at $0. Clearly not at $0 since the cloud is much more expensive and you need more of it becaus

> In most cases, it's only cheaper if you value engineering time at $0. Clearly not at $0 since the cloud is much more expensive and you need more of it because it's slower. If you could have someone do setup and maintenance for free, obviously you'd be way ahead. So the question is really how much does it cost and whether it's cheaper than the cloud tax. At a previous startup our AWS bill would've been enough to hire about 3 to 4 full time sysadmins at silicon valley rates. Our workload wasn't huge. I estimated at the time we could've taken one month of AWS cost to buy more than enough equipment to run everything in-house with redundancy, then hire two people to run it all and bank the rest. At current startup, we're still very small and have no real customer traffic, but the AWS bill is getting close, not there yet, to pay for one full time person. For a workload that could be hosted on a few ancient laptops over a home DSL line if we wanted. Yes, there's quite the convenience in being able to just click a new instance into existence, but the true cost is also very high. Sure it's just VC money we're all lighting on fire, but I often wonder how much more could be accomplished if we didn't collectively just hand over most of the funding to AWS.