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I never said that you don't have to think about it nor did I say that "dev time is expensive, computers are cheap." What I said was that the "while [software is

I never said that you don't have to think about it nor did I say that "dev time is expensive, computers are cheap." What I said was that the "while [software is] expensive to develop, marginal cost to run it is very low." Those are completely different statements, although I could have been more specific. Low marginal cost is built into the cloud products like Lambda, S3, and autoscaling VMs. That's why they're popular, even though the servers running those services are much more expensive. Edit: I think I see the impedance mismatch here. Yes the marginal cost of spinning up another RDB instance or big VM is relatively high, but unless you’re spinning up one for each customer, the marginal cost per user is much lower. Sometimes the marginal cost is recalculated like when scaling up to more big DB instances, but the cost per unit is very low compared to say a factory that has to buy machines up front and train machinists when they need to grow. If a software company has enough servers already, the marginal cost of a new customer is often just the extra electricity used by existing compute

jcgrillo 2y ago
What I was trying to get at is that although the absolute cost of e.g. S3 API calls seems low (you get 1M of them for $5), the marginal cost (cost increase from adding one customer) can actually be very large if you make a lot of API calls. So much so that it actually causes serious problems. Cloud pricing can be very sensitive to usage, so in data intensive industries--say security monitoring, where customers may send you 1TB of logs per day--the seemingly low cost of cloud conveniences actually can be very misleading if you're not using them properly. I agree that for example, serving a web page to users where almost everything happens on the client, the marginal cost of running the software is low. But it's not always true, and it's really important to measure and track these costs otherwise you can end up in a bad way. I've seen it happen ;).

jcgrillo 2y ago

What I was trying to get at is that although the absolute cost of e.g. S3 API calls seems low (you get 1M of them for $5), the marginal cost (cost increase from adding one customer) can actually be very large if you make a lot of API calls. So much so that it actually causes serious problems. Cloud pricing can be very sensitive to usage, so in data intensive industries--say security monitoring, where customers may send you 1TB of logs per day--the seemingly low cost of cloud conveniences actually can be very misleading if you're not using them properly. I agree that for example, serving a web page to users where almost everything happens on the client, the marginal cost of running the software is low. But it's not always true, and it's really important to measure and track these costs otherwise you can end up in a bad way. I've seen it happen ;).