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Canva is a case where AWS made sense for the founders. The founders anyway made billions and who cares if you give a few hundreds millions to Jeff and have to

Canva is a case where AWS made sense for the founders. The founders anyway made billions and who cares if you give a few hundreds millions to Jeff and have to hire expensive AWS consultants if you can avoid hiring a few ops people that actually know how to operate a server /s More seriously, I think the sweet spot is to buy 2x o 3x what you expect to need but do it off the cloud. At Canva's scale you'll spend hundreds of thousands, save literal millions and have way more headroom and stability than with crappy auctioned instances on AWS.

iLoveOncall 3y ago
At Canva's scale you'll spend hundreds of thousands a year, just hiring one of the engineers working on your home-grown solution. Multiple this by 50 or more just for the staff, before talking about hardware, cost of delivery speed, cost of bugs, etc.
- andrewstuart 3y ago
  Instead you can spend millions on paying top market dollar to AWS experts trying to work out your giant pile of spaghetti cloud infrastructure. Desperately trying to work out if they can delete this resource or that because who the hell knows which bit of critical code is using it. Or spending days trying to manage a chewing gum ball of IAM policies.
  - weird-eye-issue 3y ago
    Wouldn't you just be swapping those problems with similar problems if you switched to on prem? > Desperately trying to work out if they can delete this resource or that because who the hell knows which bit of critical code is using it. How is this unique to the cloud?
  - iLoveOncall 3y ago
    > Instead you can spend millions on paying top market dollar to AWS experts trying to work out your giant pile of spaghetti cloud infrastructure. The point is that you will spend millions anyway. Might as well have something better than whatever home-grown dumpster fire your team will come up with. You also seem very ignorant of how AWS works. I've never had to wonder if I could delete a resource or not, because all our resources are created via CloudFormation. Same for IAM policies.
  - rirze 3y ago
    Sounds like your experience is limited to badly managed CloudOps teams.
oefrha 3y ago
Apple uses AWS for most(?) of their cloud services. TikTok grew to the #1 spot entirely on a public cloud (Alibaba). I’m sure they sure have hired “a few ops people that actually know how to operate a server” instead.
- nemothekid 3y ago
  The anti-cloud sentiment on HN is as old as time; there will always be posters who can claim that they can build X with just dedicated machines on Hetzner for 1/10th of the cost. Yet AWS keeps growing and the people running these companies must be unable to do basic math. My account just crossed 11 years, and I think the whole cloud vs on-prem conversation is probably one of the most least productive conversations on HN. If there was so much waste out there you would think someone would figure out how to just siphon all that waste directly into their pockets instead of Jeff's; and maybe they have, I don't know, but the posts are always the same, handwaving about how the mark ups are insane the engineers at these companies aren't able to balance a checkbook.
  - kkielhofner 3y ago
    Inertia, group think, marketing, FUD, and "no one ever got fired for buying X" is INCREDIBLY powerful. At this point even the not-infrequent public cloud outages are essentially shrugged off with "Eh, we use $CLOUD, that's what everyone uses. What are you going to do?" The ops team can actually say "It's Amazon, not our problem." while they sit around powerless to do anything about it. Yes there is the "survive anything AWS related" geo-distributed multi-region approach that you pretty rarely even see because it itself requires an army of AWS experts and drastically increased cost to actually implement and operate while not shooting yourself in the foot left and right - actually decreasing reliability. Not to mention the uber-unicorn "multi cloud" which at least I've never seen or actually heard of in practice. These don't usually survive even an initial cost review.
  - betaby 3y ago
    > there will always be posters who can claim that they can build X with just dedicated machines on Hetzner for 1/10th of the cost and some of them just did. Both know names and small shops. Big names like cloud-flare R2 or Backblaze b2.

iLoveOncall 3y ago

At Canva's scale you'll spend hundreds of thousands a year, just hiring one of the engineers working on your home-grown solution. Multiple this by 50 or more just for the staff, before talking about hardware, cost of delivery speed, cost of bugs, etc.

andrewstuart 3y ago
Instead you can spend millions on paying top market dollar to AWS experts trying to work out your giant pile of spaghetti cloud infrastructure. Desperately trying to work out if they can delete this resource or that because who the hell knows which bit of critical code is using it. Or spending days trying to manage a chewing gum ball of IAM policies.
- weird-eye-issue 3y ago
  Wouldn't you just be swapping those problems with similar problems if you switched to on prem? > Desperately trying to work out if they can delete this resource or that because who the hell knows which bit of critical code is using it. How is this unique to the cloud?
- iLoveOncall 3y ago
  > Instead you can spend millions on paying top market dollar to AWS experts trying to work out your giant pile of spaghetti cloud infrastructure. The point is that you will spend millions anyway. Might as well have something better than whatever home-grown dumpster fire your team will come up with. You also seem very ignorant of how AWS works. I've never had to wonder if I could delete a resource or not, because all our resources are created via CloudFormation. Same for IAM policies.
- rirze 3y ago
  Sounds like your experience is limited to badly managed CloudOps teams.

oefrha 3y ago

Apple uses AWS for most(?) of their cloud services. TikTok grew to the #1 spot entirely on a public cloud (Alibaba). I’m sure they sure have hired “a few ops people that actually know how to operate a server” instead.

nemothekid 3y ago
The anti-cloud sentiment on HN is as old as time; there will always be posters who can claim that they can build X with just dedicated machines on Hetzner for 1/10th of the cost. Yet AWS keeps growing and the people running these companies must be unable to do basic math. My account just crossed 11 years, and I think the whole cloud vs on-prem conversation is probably one of the most least productive conversations on HN. If there was so much waste out there you would think someone would figure out how to just siphon all that waste directly into their pockets instead of Jeff's; and maybe they have, I don't know, but the posts are always the same, handwaving about how the mark ups are insane the engineers at these companies aren't able to balance a checkbook.
- kkielhofner 3y ago
  Inertia, group think, marketing, FUD, and "no one ever got fired for buying X" is INCREDIBLY powerful. At this point even the not-infrequent public cloud outages are essentially shrugged off with "Eh, we use $CLOUD, that's what everyone uses. What are you going to do?" The ops team can actually say "It's Amazon, not our problem." while they sit around powerless to do anything about it. Yes there is the "survive anything AWS related" geo-distributed multi-region approach that you pretty rarely even see because it itself requires an army of AWS experts and drastically increased cost to actually implement and operate while not shooting yourself in the foot left and right - actually decreasing reliability. Not to mention the uber-unicorn "multi cloud" which at least I've never seen or actually heard of in practice. These don't usually survive even an initial cost review.
- betaby 3y ago
  > there will always be posters who can claim that they can build X with just dedicated machines on Hetzner for 1/10th of the cost and some of them just did. Both know names and small shops. Big names like cloud-flare R2 or Backblaze b2.