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I always get the feeling that most cloud ideas come straight out of California, where hiring even an unexperienced administrator could cost you a couple hundred

I always get the feeling that most cloud ideas come straight out of California, where hiring even an unexperienced administrator could cost you a couple hundred grand a year. Of course cloud services look pretty attractive if you can just instead hire one consultant for a one time fee and pay way less until your business grows. The problem is that mostly anywhere else in the world, you can get personell for much cheaper.

toomuchtodo 4y ago
If you're a startup with VC money, cloud is for you. The game is scaling as fast as possible, costs be damned. But then came the cargo cult, where if you wanted to be hip, smart, and innovative, why you no cloud? This has led to a lot of orgs jumping in and finding out, "holy shit this is expensive AF and we're not getting a lot of value out of this spend." I have seen this a lot in financial services for example, but there are savvy orgs: Bank of America saves $2B/year by running their own internal cloud infra. For highly volatile workloads, ephemeral workloads, anything where go forward capacity is fuzzy or unknown, cloud is awesome. For anything where your margins aren't robust, or your workload is known and consistent, you're better off going through the schlep of internal IT management (as long as your org isn't dysfunctional and how you operate this is a business enabler, not a hinderance, forcing shadow IT attempts). If you can't generate more revenue or margin, you've gotta look at cost savings, including the cloud premium.
- selfmodruntime 4y ago
  > For highly volatile workloads, ephemeral workloads, anything where go forward capacity is fuzzy or unknown The thing is, I've yet to see any startup even with VC money that has a product which has this need. Most startups nowadays factor away common crud, like booking a service or providing organisational tools. These high pressure, intense workloads are often incredibly unrealistic.

toomuchtodo 4y ago

If you're a startup with VC money, cloud is for you. The game is scaling as fast as possible, costs be damned. But then came the cargo cult, where if you wanted to be hip, smart, and innovative, why you no cloud? This has led to a lot of orgs jumping in and finding out, "holy shit this is expensive AF and we're not getting a lot of value out of this spend." I have seen this a lot in financial services for example, but there are savvy orgs: Bank of America saves $2B/year by running their own internal cloud infra. For highly volatile workloads, ephemeral workloads, anything where go forward capacity is fuzzy or unknown, cloud is awesome. For anything where your margins aren't robust, or your workload is known and consistent, you're better off going through the schlep of internal IT management (as long as your org isn't dysfunctional and how you operate this is a business enabler, not a hinderance, forcing shadow IT attempts). If you can't generate more revenue or margin, you've gotta look at cost savings, including the cloud premium.

selfmodruntime 4y ago
> For highly volatile workloads, ephemeral workloads, anything where go forward capacity is fuzzy or unknown The thing is, I've yet to see any startup even with VC money that has a product which has this need. Most startups nowadays factor away common crud, like booking a service or providing organisational tools. These high pressure, intense workloads are often incredibly unrealistic.