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> What I am missing though in the monthly cost is the personnel cost. It's not like operating AWS doesn't involve any personnel cost, does it? Even though it w

> What I am missing though in the monthly cost is the personnel cost. It's not like operating AWS doesn't involve any personnel cost, does it? Even though it was marketed as such, it has become clear that managing a public cloud such as AWS is at least as complex as managing a datacenter. Sure, you don't swap broken drives in RAID arrays but you have other complexities to deal with - and that complexity increases year by year.

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kevincox 4y ago
I'm pretty confident that at small scale AWS requires less operating costs that colo. Things as simple as s3 take lots of work to setup and run in a colo (well probably at least 3 locations if you want really good durability) and things like backups quickly build on that. Even a single computer will have occasional hardware failures, system installs and more. You usually can't restore an entire disk from backup like you can on AWS if a DB upgrade goes wrong. But I think AWS "management" definitely starts paying for itself when you want the higher availability features such as managed SQL databases, load balancers, queues and other features. None of them are super complicated on their own but they add up quickly, and at small scale the cost of having experts in each service will outweigh the cost of the service. It is also worth considering the opportunity costs of changes. On-prem you may have a few spare servers lying around but if you need another machine or a new piece of hardware it will take significant time. On AWS you can spin up a 4 GPU machine in seconds, if you need more webserver machines just press the button. This quick turnaround can be very valuable as you are developing a new product and don't quite know what the requirements are. As you get bigger the costs definitely flip. The profit margin that AWS takes starts to outweigh the costs of having more experts (and as your team grows you may have already acquired most of these experts, so no training is required) and it makes sense to move things in-house onto dedicated hardware.

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kevincox 4y ago

I'm pretty confident that at small scale AWS requires less operating costs that colo. Things as simple as s3 take lots of work to setup and run in a colo (well probably at least 3 locations if you want really good durability) and things like backups quickly build on that. Even a single computer will have occasional hardware failures, system installs and more. You usually can't restore an entire disk from backup like you can on AWS if a DB upgrade goes wrong. But I think AWS "management" definitely starts paying for itself when you want the higher availability features such as managed SQL databases, load balancers, queues and other features. None of them are super complicated on their own but they add up quickly, and at small scale the cost of having experts in each service will outweigh the cost of the service. It is also worth considering the opportunity costs of changes. On-prem you may have a few spare servers lying around but if you need another machine or a new piece of hardware it will take significant time. On AWS you can spin up a 4 GPU machine in seconds, if you need more webserver machines just press the button. This quick turnaround can be very valuable as you are developing a new product and don't quite know what the requirements are. As you get bigger the costs definitely flip. The profit margin that AWS takes starts to outweigh the costs of having more experts (and as your team grows you may have already acquired most of these experts, so no training is required) and it makes sense to move things in-house onto dedicated hardware.