3 ms·

> just $142/day I would love to see a deeper financial analysis of your scenario that consider the other variables mentioned like ops team, bandwidth, power, a

by mtrovo 2y ago

> just $142/day I would love to see a deeper financial analysis of your scenario that consider the other variables mentioned like ops team, bandwidth, power, and cabinet rental. Also it's important to be honest about the initial investment needed, there's a component of upfront capital cost that could be invested elsewhere in the business that a simple price per day cannot account for. If you can't support that upfront investment, my assumption is that it may be better to remain with cloud services just because the cost structure is more predictable.

arielcostas 2y ago
As in every business decision, you must weigh whether CapEx or OpEx is a better option. Whether that is compute space, offices, vehicles, or almost anything else. For startups? Cloud is really interesting because you get cheap compute without any capital investment, and you might get credits from your provider (e.g. AWS Activate), as well as unlimited scale-up if you experience high growth in a short time frame. For established companies with an almost-fixed usage, going CapEx (renting DC space and buying your own hardware) is a no-brainer, assuming you can afford the upfront expense and know (or have enough reasons to believe) that you'll be around for 3-5 years to justify the expense. --- The important thing is to escape flashy provider-specific services that may lock you in long term. For example, serverless functions (like AWS Lambda or Azure Functions), authentication systems like Cognito or Auth0; or database systems like DynamoDB. Because then, you're locked in unless you want to go through the pain of reimplementing every serverless function into your own "serverful" (is that a term?) code, or migrating every single user out of Cognito, or migrate GBs (or TBs) of data into your own database system.

3 ms·

> just $142/day I would love to see a deeper financial analysis of your scenario that consider the other variables mentioned like ops team, bandwidth, power, a

by mtrovo 2y ago

arielcostas 2y ago
As in every business decision, you must weigh whether CapEx or OpEx is a better option. Whether that is compute space, offices, vehicles, or almost anything else. For startups? Cloud is really interesting because you get cheap compute without any capital investment, and you might get credits from your provider (e.g. AWS Activate), as well as unlimited scale-up if you experience high growth in a short time frame. For established companies with an almost-fixed usage, going CapEx (renting DC space and buying your own hardware) is a no-brainer, assuming you can afford the upfront expense and know (or have enough reasons to believe) that you'll be around for 3-5 years to justify the expense. --- The important thing is to escape flashy provider-specific services that may lock you in long term. For example, serverless functions (like AWS Lambda or Azure Functions), authentication systems like Cognito or Auth0; or database systems like DynamoDB. Because then, you're locked in unless you want to go through the pain of reimplementing every serverless function into your own "serverful" (is that a term?) code, or migrating every single user out of Cognito, or migrate GBs (or TBs) of data into your own database system.