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> Cost of DIY and support: You’re absolutely right that 24x7 ops could eat up any savings if you built everything from scratch without automation or if you need
by sksjvsla 1y ago
> Cost of DIY and support:
You’re absolutely right that 24x7 ops could eat up any savings if you built everything from scratch without automation or if you needed dedicated staff watching dashboards all night. In our case:
• We heavily invested upfront in infrastructure-as-code (Terraform + Ansible) so that infra is deterministic, repeatable, and self-healing where possible (e.g. auto-provisioning, automated backup/restore, rolling updates).
• Monitoring + alerting (Prometheus + Alertmanager) means we don’t need to watch screens — we get woken up only if there’s truly a critical issue.
• We don’t try to match AWS’s service level (e.g. RTO of minutes for every scenario) — we sized our setup to our risk profile and customers’ SLAs.
> True cost comparison:
• The migration was done as part of my CTO role, so no external consulting costs. The time investment paid back within months because the ongoing cost to operate the infra is low (we’re not constantly firefighting).
• I agree that if you had to hire more people just to manage this, it could negate the savings. That’s why for some teams, AWS is still a better fit.
> Business vs. cost drivers:
Honestly, our primary driver was sovereignty and compliance — cost savings just made the business case easier to sell internally. Like you, our European customers were increasingly skeptical of US cloud providers, so this aligned with both compliance and go-to-market.
> Terraform / YAGNI:
Fair point! Terraform probably is more than we need for the current scale. I went with it partly because it fits our team’s skillset and lets us keep options open as we grow (multi-provider, DR regions, etc).
And, finally, because this, I am posting about it. I am sharing as much as I can, and just spread the work about it. I just sharing my experience and knowledge. If you have any questions or want to discuss further, feel free to reach out at jk@datapult.dk!