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A single developer in Denmark (it's a Danish company) would easily cost around $100K a year to the company. They might save 90% of their $24K on hardware, but

A single developer in Denmark (it's a Danish company) would easily cost around $100K a year to the company. They might save 90% of their $24K on hardware, but just spend probably double the amount on salaries. This is why AWS is in the end cheaper if it is costs more for the same (let's be real it's not at all the same actually) software.

hermanzegerman 1y ago
The OP already said that they spend the same amount of time maintaining this vs AWS
- iLoveOncall 1y ago
  For now :)
  - sksjvsla 1y ago
    If you want me to assess what I would be needing the next 5-10 years, I'd make a very different thread here on HN. The defining conditions is my current setup and business requirement. It works well and we've resisted pretending that we know where we will be in 5 years. I am reminded of the 2023 story of the surprisingly simple infra of Stack Overflow[1] and the 2025 story of that Stack overflow is almost dead[2] Given that the setup works now, one can't add that it is only working "for now". I see no client demand in the foreseeable future leading me to think that this has been fundamentally architected incorrectly. [1] https://x.com/sahnlam/status/1629713954225405952 https://x.com/sahnlam/status/1629713954225405952 [2] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/stack-overflow-is-almost-dead/ https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/stack-overflow-is-almost-...
    - iLoveOncall 1y ago
      That is absolutely not what I was talking about. I'm talking about the issues that will happen to your current setup and requirement. Disaster recovery, monitoring, etc.
      - sksjvsla 1y ago
        > Disaster recovery, monitoring, etc The ISO 27001 has me audited for just that (disaster recovery and monitoring) so that settles it, no? Also worth noting that these are the two things you don't really get from the hyperscalers. If you want to count on more than their uptime guarantees, you have to roll some DR yourself and while you might think that this is easy, it is not easier than doing it with Terraform and Ansible on other clouds. I have had my DR and monitoring audited in its AWS and EU version. One was no easier or harder than the other. But the EU setup gave me a clear answer to clients on CLOUD act, Shrems II, GDPR, Safe Harbor, which is a competitive advantage.
anticodon 1y ago
It sounds like if you rent a VPS/VDS in any other place than Amazon, you'll have to hire a separate person to babysit it 24/7. It's not true.
- iLoveOncall 1y ago
  Obviously it's not true, but if you want to put the following on your VPS: > • Ansible roles for PostgreSQL (with automated s3cmd backups + Prometheus metrics) • Hardening tasks (auditd rules, ufw, SSH lockdown, chrony for clock sync) • Rolling web app deploys with rollback + Cloudflare draining • Full monitoring with Prometheus, Alertmanager, Grafana Agent, Loki, and exporters • TLS automation via Certbot in Docker + Ansible You'll spend a heck of a lot of time on setting it up originally, and you will spend a lot of time keeping it up-to-date, maintaining it, and fixing the inevitable issues that will occur. If their bill was 200K a year, why not. But at 24K a year, 25% of an employee's salary, it is negligible and most likely a bad choice.
  - sksjvsla 1y ago
    People keep comparing cloud costs to employee costs, but I think that’s the wrong metric. The real ratio to look at is cloud spend vs. the revenue you can unlock. For me, switching from AWS to European providers wasn’t just about saving on cloud bills (though that was a nice bonus). It was about reducing risk and enabling revenue. Relying on U.S. hyperscalers in Europe is becoming too risky — what happens if Safe Harbor doesn’t get renewed? Or if Schrems III (or whatever comes next) finally forces regulators to act? Being able to stay compliant and protect revenue is worth far more than quibbling over which cloud costs a little less.
  - anticodon 1y ago
    Some of these tasks are required when you run your service in Amazon Cloud as well. It's not all free and not all by default. You'll need someone experienced with Amazon Services to set up many of these things in the Amazon cloud as well. Also, it's not like you need everything you mention and need it immediately. NTP clock syncing is a part of any Linux distro for the last 20 years if not more. I don't remember that Amazon automatically locks down SSH (didn't touch AWS for 7-8 years, don't remember such a feature out of the box 8 years ago). Rolling web app deploys with rollback can be implemented in multiple ways, depends on your app, can be quite easy in some instances. Also, it's not something that Amazon can do for you for free, you need to spend some effort on the development side anyways, doesn't matter if you deploy on Amazon or somewhere else. There's no magic bullet that makes automatic rollback free and flawless without development effort.

hermanzegerman 1y ago

The OP already said that they spend the same amount of time maintaining this vs AWS

iLoveOncall 1y ago
For now :)
- sksjvsla 1y ago
  If you want me to assess what I would be needing the next 5-10 years, I'd make a very different thread here on HN. The defining conditions is my current setup and business requirement. It works well and we've resisted pretending that we know where we will be in 5 years. I am reminded of the 2023 story of the surprisingly simple infra of Stack Overflow[1] and the 2025 story of that Stack overflow is almost dead[2] Given that the setup works now, one can't add that it is only working "for now". I see no client demand in the foreseeable future leading me to think that this has been fundamentally architected incorrectly. [1] https://x.com/sahnlam/status/1629713954225405952 https://x.com/sahnlam/status/1629713954225405952 [2] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/stack-overflow-is-almost-dead/ https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/stack-overflow-is-almost-...
  - iLoveOncall 1y ago
    That is absolutely not what I was talking about. I'm talking about the issues that will happen to your current setup and requirement. Disaster recovery, monitoring, etc.
    - sksjvsla 1y ago
      > Disaster recovery, monitoring, etc The ISO 27001 has me audited for just that (disaster recovery and monitoring) so that settles it, no? Also worth noting that these are the two things you don't really get from the hyperscalers. If you want to count on more than their uptime guarantees, you have to roll some DR yourself and while you might think that this is easy, it is not easier than doing it with Terraform and Ansible on other clouds. I have had my DR and monitoring audited in its AWS and EU version. One was no easier or harder than the other. But the EU setup gave me a clear answer to clients on CLOUD act, Shrems II, GDPR, Safe Harbor, which is a competitive advantage.

anticodon 1y ago

It sounds like if you rent a VPS/VDS in any other place than Amazon, you'll have to hire a separate person to babysit it 24/7. It's not true.

iLoveOncall 1y ago
Obviously it's not true, but if you want to put the following on your VPS: > • Ansible roles for PostgreSQL (with automated s3cmd backups + Prometheus metrics) • Hardening tasks (auditd rules, ufw, SSH lockdown, chrony for clock sync) • Rolling web app deploys with rollback + Cloudflare draining • Full monitoring with Prometheus, Alertmanager, Grafana Agent, Loki, and exporters • TLS automation via Certbot in Docker + Ansible You'll spend a heck of a lot of time on setting it up originally, and you will spend a lot of time keeping it up-to-date, maintaining it, and fixing the inevitable issues that will occur. If their bill was 200K a year, why not. But at 24K a year, 25% of an employee's salary, it is negligible and most likely a bad choice.
- sksjvsla 1y ago
  People keep comparing cloud costs to employee costs, but I think that’s the wrong metric. The real ratio to look at is cloud spend vs. the revenue you can unlock. For me, switching from AWS to European providers wasn’t just about saving on cloud bills (though that was a nice bonus). It was about reducing risk and enabling revenue. Relying on U.S. hyperscalers in Europe is becoming too risky — what happens if Safe Harbor doesn’t get renewed? Or if Schrems III (or whatever comes next) finally forces regulators to act? Being able to stay compliant and protect revenue is worth far more than quibbling over which cloud costs a little less.
- anticodon 1y ago
  Some of these tasks are required when you run your service in Amazon Cloud as well. It's not all free and not all by default. You'll need someone experienced with Amazon Services to set up many of these things in the Amazon cloud as well. Also, it's not like you need everything you mention and need it immediately. NTP clock syncing is a part of any Linux distro for the last 20 years if not more. I don't remember that Amazon automatically locks down SSH (didn't touch AWS for 7-8 years, don't remember such a feature out of the box 8 years ago). Rolling web app deploys with rollback can be implemented in multiple ways, depends on your app, can be quite easy in some instances. Also, it's not something that Amazon can do for you for free, you need to spend some effort on the development side anyways, doesn't matter if you deploy on Amazon or somewhere else. There's no magic bullet that makes automatic rollback free and flawless without development effort.