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I looked at VMware "in the cloud". It was around $50,000 - $100,000 per year for 48 cores. I've defended AWS pricing many times, mostly because of ability to bu

I looked at VMware "in the cloud". It was around $50,000 - $100,000 per year for 48 cores. I've defended AWS pricing many times, mostly because of ability to burst etc. But the VMware workloads are often much flatter in terms of demand - ie, many systems just left running so the AWS value - while there of course, isn't as obvious to me.

alephnerd 3y ago
"In the cloud" options are often much more expensive than what they should be due to customer expectations. The margins are much higher than in on-prem (where 80% "discounts" are common).
- tempnow987 3y ago
  Sure. That said, the cost / benefit tradeoffs often seem pretty good for AWS. The cost is low enough to other costs on a project that gain on velocity is worth it. In others gains on reliability, maintenance savings etc. Ended up doing a small on-prem solution. VMWare for 6 CPUs x 32 cores = 192 cores runs about $3K/year for the software side which is a good deal to get started. That leaves about $240K/year or so to cover other costs. Not a slam dunk necessarily, but the on-prem store with vmware is not unreasonable.
  - alephnerd 3y ago
    > the cost / benefit tradeoffs often seem pretty good for AWS If it's greenfield I'd agree. There's a reason why most companies founded after 2008 have a heavy public cloud presence. The issue is if you are a large brownfield deployment (like most F1000s), a "Cloud Transformation" takes forever and is costly. It can be done - for example Capital One and Broadcom - but it requires executive buy-in to respect engineering leadership and build a solid DevOps/Platform team. I know if I was to found my own company tomorrow, I'd be entire cloud first because of velocity and ease of scalability, but you can't expect a company like UnitedHealth Group to transition to an entirely cloud first environment within a 2-3 year timeframe as even a minor outage represents millions of dollars lost a minute and litigation. Over the next 10-15 years we'll see a large number of non-tech first companies becoming multi-cloud, but in 2023, it's still work in progress.

alephnerd 3y ago

"In the cloud" options are often much more expensive than what they should be due to customer expectations. The margins are much higher than in on-prem (where 80% "discounts" are common).

tempnow987 3y ago
Sure. That said, the cost / benefit tradeoffs often seem pretty good for AWS. The cost is low enough to other costs on a project that gain on velocity is worth it. In others gains on reliability, maintenance savings etc. Ended up doing a small on-prem solution. VMWare for 6 CPUs x 32 cores = 192 cores runs about $3K/year for the software side which is a good deal to get started. That leaves about $240K/year or so to cover other costs. Not a slam dunk necessarily, but the on-prem store with vmware is not unreasonable.
- alephnerd 3y ago
  > the cost / benefit tradeoffs often seem pretty good for AWS If it's greenfield I'd agree. There's a reason why most companies founded after 2008 have a heavy public cloud presence. The issue is if you are a large brownfield deployment (like most F1000s), a "Cloud Transformation" takes forever and is costly. It can be done - for example Capital One and Broadcom - but it requires executive buy-in to respect engineering leadership and build a solid DevOps/Platform team. I know if I was to found my own company tomorrow, I'd be entire cloud first because of velocity and ease of scalability, but you can't expect a company like UnitedHealth Group to transition to an entirely cloud first environment within a 2-3 year timeframe as even a minor outage represents millions of dollars lost a minute and litigation. Over the next 10-15 years we'll see a large number of non-tech first companies becoming multi-cloud, but in 2023, it's still work in progress.