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Years ago I was making the case that instead of digging ourselves into the Amazon eco-system with S3 storage, EC2 instances, DynamoDB and various other Amazon s

• xfactorial 6mo ago
  The whole business model is around “Optimization through custom tools”. We can go with your idea, sure: a few months in, an Account Manager from the cloud provider shows up and says your bill could be reduced by 50% if you just adopt some changes, using their custom, super optimized tools (“minor changes” will be the mantra). And now you have your own company looking back to you on how can they get those savings, people who don’t understand what a VM is and cannot differentiate salesforce from an elastic container, as everything is “cloud”, but heard “50% off”.
  • walrus01 6mo ago
    Preventing this from happening requires a clued-in CTO and equivalent senior level leadership who can defend against such 'attack' methods and knows the difference between, for instance, paying a monthly recurring cost to host a Linux/KVM virtual machine and paying for some totally 'cloud' SaAs. Further, it needs people in decision making roles who understand and value the strategic differences between having an infrastructure concept that is trapped in one provider's proprietary software tooling ecosystem (aws, azure, etc), vs things built on open standards that are portable.
    • palmotea 6mo ago
      > Preventing this from happening requires a clued-in CTO and equivalent senior level leadership who can defend against such 'attack' methods and knows the difference between, for instance, paying a monthly recurring cost to host a Linux/KVM virtual machine and paying for some totally 'cloud' SaAs. And the reality is eventually you'll get a clueless one, and everything will revert to the mean. And the mean is heavily influenced by marketing propaganda.
      • Muromec 6mo ago
        This is true, but making money in any business is constantly fighting against the entropy and regression to the mean. Also, maybe, just maybe it's an example of relative competitive advantage and paying more for the AWS is the right call.
    • eddythompson80 6mo ago
      > Preventing this from happening requires a clued-in CTO and equivalent senior level leadership Most CTOs (and increasingly M2s and M3s) I've met are what I call "box architects". You know the ones who love drawing boxes, moving one box inside another box, drawing a line between 2 boxes or changing a unidirectional arrow into a bidirectional one, then declaring the hard part is done and now we need any random engineer to implement that or "Is there an AWS service that does that? I just don't see the value in us doing it in house". A "super optimized tools" is just a box that you swap for another box and the "minor changes" will be just a couple of arrows than need to change or another box to swap for another box. You get them to feel good about doing architect stuff plus the 10x reduction in the bill. They can always replace that box with another box later after all.
      • kriberg 6mo ago
        We call those people PowerPoint architects. They haven't coded or built anything for so long, if ever, that they wouldn't even how to, by this point. The only tool they know is PowerPoint and their slides have more boxes with words than any big box store
  • RobotToaster 6mo ago
    Do people actually take claims like that from glorified salesmen seriously? If a car salesman told me I could save 50% of my fuel bill from driving their special car a certain way I'd laugh at them.
    • piperswe 6mo ago
      They're probably not wrong, if they're talking about hypermiling a Prius
    • walrus01 6mo ago
      > Do people actually take claims like that from glorified salesmen seriously? People who know the tech, no Non-technical middle management types, yes. It produces revenue when done aggressively enough, google "solarwinds sales people" for many anecdotal examples of extreme persistence. Not that I agree with it.
    • SpicyLemonZest 6mo ago
      You'd be wrong to laugh at them, because different cars of the same general size can indeed vary 50% or more in fuel efficiency. It's fair to be skeptical of promises of huge savings, and question why your counterparty would benefit from giving you those savings, but sometimes there's a good reason.
      • hermanzegerman 6mo ago
        Name one example of a 2026 car with the same size, fuel type and class where the difference in mileage is >=50% I have a very hard time believing this, especially with fuel economy and emission regulations
        • SpicyLemonZest 6mo ago
          The 2026 Toyota Corolla GR has 22mpg combined, and the normal 2026 Corolla has 35mpg with gas or 50mpg with a hybrid powertrain. It is true that fuel economy regulations make it much less practical to deliver gas guzzlers out of pure laziness. (As you may know, the Corolla GR is by far the most expensive of these options, because it's designed to achieve horsepower over mileage.)
• nine_k 6mo ago
  Most cloud VMs have network-attached storage working through a billing layer, and its IOPS numbers are pathetic. This makes running your own DB in a cloud VM much less reasonable. Now you can use local NVMe, but you still have to set up your own failover. The original promise of the cloud is "you pay us less than you pay your sysadmins", which is not entirely unreasonable, especially at early stages. Of course running on bare metal from Europe's own Hetzner is even more cost-efficient, if you already have a lot of sysadmin chops.
  • jbverschoor 6mo ago
    Nah.. Amazon started with “ephimeral” compute. That was the whole thing why you needed another storage layer Unlike most VPSes
• tt24 6mo ago
  This is great, your suggestion to replace s3 and ddb is to run some VMs? I don’t blame people for being skeptical
  • ApolloFortyNine 6mo ago
    Yea, op just handwaved away all scalability. Guessing their response would be 'launch more vms'.
    • actionfromafar 6mo ago
      Scalability is great, when you need it. Most companies don’t need it.
    • hermanzegerman 6mo ago
      Why does the Dutch Central Bank need scalability?
    • izacus 6mo ago
      VMs scale just fine.
  • filleduchaos 6mo ago
    Projects like Ceph and Minio have existed for years, though? Beyond that, I just don't understand your point of view at all. Do people unironically think there is some super special dark magic being done in the bowels of Amazon, as opposed to just...code that runs on (virtual and physical) machines? The open source community yielded Linux but it's just sooo impossible for it to yield an object storage service? What a strangely shackled view of the world.
  • lelanthran 6mo ago
    > This is great, your suggestion to replace s3 and ddb is to run some VMs? Well... yes? What do you think the AWS S3 and DDB is running on? Fairy dust?
    • tt24 6mo ago
• BadBadJellyBean 6mo ago
  I prefer not using managed services but I kind of understand the appeal. Instead of paying several engineers, that you have to vet first, to configure and maintain the services adjacent to your product you can just pay AWS or Azure or someone else to maintain the service. Then you can concentrate your whole manpower on your product. In case the service goes down you can blame someone else and maybe even recover some money. On the other hand it of course makes you dependent on the provider.
  • mulmen 6mo ago
    What you’re describing is outsourcing. It’s still possible with on-prem or cloud VMs. You just hire a contractor provide those services.
    • BadBadJellyBean 6mo ago
      You are correct but I don't know about the cost structure. Also you have to somehow verify that they do a good job. You sometimes only see bad work when something goes wrong. Also you have to first find a company that provides the service. The cloud makes it simple. They offer you managed service X. They hire experts for service x and you pay a part of the cost on top of your infra cost. No searching. No vetting. You just use the service. I see the why this might be attractive. It isn't to me. But the pencil pushers like it.
      • deleted 6mo ago
        [deleted]
  • actionfromafar 6mo ago
    In my experience it doesn’t take long until you use such complex offerings from the cloud vendors, you need those ops engineers anyways. Just with slightly different skillsets.
    • BadBadJellyBean 6mo ago
      I'd say you need people with certain skill sets anyways but at a certain scale you have to get specialized people for some service. Database admins, kubernetes admins, network admins. At a small scale that can be one or two people. But if you want 24/7 with a bigger scale you need multiple people for each role. You have to find them, pay them, schedule their absences. To some management types it looks like a good deal to not deal with that and just let Amazon/Microsoft/Google/etc. deal with finding people to support the service and just pay a bit extra to the infra cost. Then you can only hire cloud infra admins. I don't think it works that way but that is what I have observed.
• kypro 6mo ago
  This would only work if you have a solid devops team imo. AWS makes it extremely easy to deploy and scale infra. Another advantage of AWS is permission management, automatic RDS snapshots, cloudwatch comes out of the box... You can do everything with VMs, but in practise it's probably much harder.
  • holoduke 6mo ago
    With opsAI using Claude it's becoming easier again.
• baq 6mo ago
  s3 is kinda hard to replace if you actually use it; the rest is manageable with varying levels of pain
  • jmalicki 6mo ago
    SQS is particularly hard, there are other options, but it has less direct competitors than S3
    • jamesfinlayson 6mo ago
      Agreed - I use AWS at work and try and keep the services we use to a minimum. S3 and DynamoDB are ones that somewhat lock us in but the way we use them, they are replaceable (not relying on any niche features). The different queue services would definitely be harder to swap out though.
• PaulKeeble 6mo ago
  There was a period when development and system adminstrators were really concerned about vendor lock in and would choose on the basis of the ease of moving to a different platform, Java and J2EE was clearly based on this mindset. I have always found it odd people have been willing to adopt AWS with no apparent easy route off given its price.
  • pjmlp 6mo ago
    Still is, nowadays the standard is Jakarta EE 11, alongside Microprofile, which Spring also uses parts of.
  • bell-cot 6mo ago
    > I have always found it odd people have been willing to adopt AWS ... It's the new "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM".
• kevin_nisbet 6mo ago
  I've operated at companies using both models, and have observed similar reactions to suggestions of using the cloud. To me it's like anything else in engineering, are the costs, risks, and benefits fully understood, and worth the tradeoff in the particular context. I worked for a startup doing internet of things, the consumer would buy a device and get lifetime service baked in. And that company was a step further, just renting space in a colo was incredibly cost efficient, which supported the sales model and competitive landscape of that product. But it was also very costly to attention, one of the most valuable resources. But it can also get costly in non-intuitive ways, an example that comes to mind is we started to get interviews where a generation of candidates no longer had experience with metal, it was a foreign world to them. With more experience, I find it's really the costs that get severely underestimated, both for and against the suggestion.
  • ghaff 6mo ago
    Especially in larger organizations, it's easy to lose track of all the distributed soft costs that DIY can bring (and all the bus factors that may be involved). There are lots of people that kinda want to get paid and get benefits and which require some level of management structure. At some point, you have people (on here and elsewhere) questioning what all these people in an organization do. PART of the answer is that they're doing internal work that could have been outsourced in various ways.
  • port11 6mo ago
    I’ve struggled with convincing colleagues to host on something other than AWS. I’m not sure they understand the costs and aren’t simply doubling-down on the evil they already know. In fact, I had no idea our static website at a scale-up in 2019 was costing us 90€/month; it came up when we were told to cut costs. Developers don’t always have a say in these things. Heck, I then went and got a series of certifications in GCP. Even then, I’m not sure I’d understand the full complexity and pricing options of GCP. Smaller clouds and simple VPS solutions really are the overlooked option.
  • BrandoElFollito 6mo ago
    > fully understood Unfortunately this is neither the case for very large, or very small companies. Very large companies may have some experience, but it is usually legacy. Or buried under processes and politics. Small companies will not have the experience to make the analysis
• lmf4lol 6mo ago
  I am running my startup out of a self build GPU server from our office with a backup to the cloud. I only pay for the IP address as electricity is included in the rent. If the startup fails, Ill have thousand other potential use case for it and in the worst case, it will make for a awesome gaming machine. The machine is a beast and I can serve a lot of users with it. In fact, and quite funnily, I already serve much more users with it than a lot of my older clients do with their software running on expensive k8s setup because „scale“ :-) And last, but not least, I had a lot of fun building it. Its just nice to hear that thing humming away in the corner.
  • throwaway894345 6mo ago
    > The machine is a beast and I can serve a lot of users with it. In fact, and quite funnily, I already serve much more users with it than a lot of my older clients do with their software running on expensive k8s setup because „scale“ :-) Honestly even if you have a single server, running k8s (or maybe Docker Compose for really simple cases) on it is still the simplest way to manage it (assuming you have more than 1 service, anyway). One configuration file format, one CLI tool, zero special paths to memorize, no filesystem permissions to configure, pretty good security out of the box, access to a whole bunch of helm charts and operators (for example, cert-manager, external-dns, prometheus, alert-manager, some logging operator for centralized logging with a decent UI and search, and a postgres operator for backups / replication / failover), etc.
    • ozgrakkurt 6mo ago
      This depends on what you know. Kubernetes is really not that good for me
      • throwaway894345 6mo ago
        I don’t disagree. What you know matters, but I think it’s a lot easier to learn Kubernetes than it is to learn all of the disparate tools that you need to know to cobble together something similar. Moreover, because Kubernetes is somewhat standardized, you are much more likely to be able to find quality sources on the Internet (or LLLMs, nowadays) and similarly you’re much more likely to be able to find personnel who are familiar with it compared to some bespoke alternative. It’s also worth noting that Kubernetes is conceptually quite simple—once you realize that it’s just a database of resources that are being watched by controllers, things start to click into place and it feels much simpler. In some sense Kubernetes is a bit like democracy or capitalism—it’s the worst in its class except for everything else that has been tried. :)
• petterroea 6mo ago
  For those who grew up with aws and other cloud providers this is the only reality they know of, after all.
• stuaxo 6mo ago
  S3 has become a standard outside of AWS but everything else can be done with open tools except IAM which is always a pain anyway.
• RobRivera 6mo ago
  That's genuinely my baseline, then I ask 'why do we want to manage this dependency?' I can appreciate the desire to close gaps on expertise deficiency and make a vendor responsible, but the whole schtick of 'outsource everything and focus on your business for advantage' always rang to me as just an excuse to give our money to vendors. Its almost as if the whole case for vertical integration is just taken as a wash
• fancythat 6mo ago
  Calculations from me and others have proven that cloud providers use 5-10x multipliers when selling you things. The less you use them, the better is your bottom line. At the beginning it maybe makes sense to use cloud credits to get you moving, but when credits expire or your organization grows, it is wise to invest in people that can setup things on their own. The biggest lie that cloud providers managed to sell to the world, that you don't need knowledgeable people to run things in cloud.