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AWS gives away literally tens of thousands of pounds to start ups. Granted, it's to lock them in down the line but getting free credits gets you further than no

• jjav 5y ago
  AWS credits are a toxic trap. BTDT. They'll get you far enough that you are hopefully (from AWS perspective) locked in pretty tight. And then the high monthly costs start to hit you hard.
  • lapser 5y ago
    Sure, that's true. But I've been in companies where they've had major investments and have a pretty significant number of users, and they still had stupid amounts of credits. One of my previous companies was running a third of their infra on AWS credits, and they still long runway in terms of free credits. Meanwhile, they had to shake off a £1 million a year contract for the next 5 years for 2 DCs. With AWS they were using less than half of that per year (this includes the credits they had). But even if it wasn't cheaper, requesting a new server took days, not minutes. Scaling was not possible. I'll take the credit and potentially get trapped than having to deal with an inflexible mess that is in-house managed infrastructure. At least bigger orgs are able to afford it by (hopefully) building a cloud on top of their infrastructure, but outside that, the majority should of companies be looking into the cloud. Whether that be AWS, GCP, or the smaller Clouds like DO, it doesn't matter.
    • jjav 5y ago
      > But I've been in companies where they've had major investments and have a pretty significant number of users, and they still had stupid amounts of credits. Your companies have been wiser and more frugal than mine! In every case, I've seen the credits run out before there was a penny of revenue coming in.