3 ms·

> This almost is not ever true for software startups, who get more value from speed, flexibility, and not needing to pay a team to manage hardware. It's not th

> This almost is not ever true for software startups, who get more value from speed, flexibility, and not needing to pay a team to manage hardware. It's not that simple, some costs on AWS can be high and some tasks don't need the availability/reliability guarantees AWS provides. So even for small startups sometimes having own hardware can be a good cost saver, through with some risk attached to it. For some mid-sized companies with relative fixed resource utilization sometimes renting rack space or renting bar metal (in a server center, with service for parts replacement) can be a good cost saving measure. In the end while AWS is flexible and convenient with a lot of services easily accessible it is also expensive (at least when it comes to compute power) so the question is most times how much money do the flexible, convenience and services save. For many companies this is a lot. For some companies (of any size) this is not enough. I mean this is why there are such funny things as being able to buy a "GPU compute min server center in a container" (through that's outside of the price range of an small company, but smaller versions similar to this exist, too).

ldoughty 4y ago
> It's not that simple, some costs on AWS can be high and some tasks don't need the availability/reliability guarantees AWS provides. So even for small startups sometimes having own hardware can be a good cost saver, through with some risk attached to it I agree. I'd like to add that AWS's value add can be the lack of need to understand the product configuration, just the SDK. Your start up already has developers that can read SDKs, you might not have someone on your staff that can set up an elasicsearch, redis, or other service. When you grow enough that the fine tuning of such services might matter, you likely can hire the right people to run those in house. I've been on a team with ~6 DevOps members for 5 years, and it's been very helpful to be able to pick up and drop services as we evolve.
- TimPC 4y ago
  I think it depends. My best friend works at a company that took four years to architect and build V1 of its product on prem. They had to build a lot of things by hand that are standard components in the cloud. They architected and built V2 on AWS is a single year. The higher cost is considered small by them compared to three additional years of waiting for a system to offer key features that upsell customers.

ldoughty 4y ago

> It's not that simple, some costs on AWS can be high and some tasks don't need the availability/reliability guarantees AWS provides. So even for small startups sometimes having own hardware can be a good cost saver, through with some risk attached to it I agree. I'd like to add that AWS's value add can be the lack of need to understand the product configuration, just the SDK. Your start up already has developers that can read SDKs, you might not have someone on your staff that can set up an elasicsearch, redis, or other service. When you grow enough that the fine tuning of such services might matter, you likely can hire the right people to run those in house. I've been on a team with ~6 DevOps members for 5 years, and it's been very helpful to be able to pick up and drop services as we evolve.

TimPC 4y ago
I think it depends. My best friend works at a company that took four years to architect and build V1 of its product on prem. They had to build a lot of things by hand that are standard components in the cloud. They architected and built V2 on AWS is a single year. The higher cost is considered small by them compared to three additional years of waiting for a system to offer key features that upsell customers.