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At my previous startup: because AWS gave us a bunch of credits and helped us design the infra. It meant we ran for free what they designed for free. At a previ

by maccard 6mo ago

At my previous startup: because AWS gave us a bunch of credits and helped us design the infra. It meant we ran for free what they designed for free. At a previous bigger company, getting procurement to sign up to a new provider requires writing a business case, justifying the spend and then getting multiple competing quotes and speaking to their sales teams. Signing up to a new service takes _months_ even for $10/mo as they’ll negotiate for bulk discounts and the best possible terms for something that will literally cost less per year than one of meetings they hold to discuss the “value”. Meanwhile on AWS I can click a button in the marketplace and it gets thrown in the AWS account which is pre approved spending.

xmcp123 6mo ago
Have seen this repeatedly also. Watched one company end up with a $250k AWS bill when their credits expired (which they could not pay).
- maccard 6mo ago
  If you let it go that far then you were going to blow it one way or another - it’s not an excuse to totally ignore the cloud spend but it’s a n excuse to defer it to a later date. If your successful, fix it, if your not then AWS aren’t getting paid anyway!
  - xmcp123 6mo ago
    Yeah, they had an impossible to use number of credits (YC) until they expired, so every problem became a AWS solution. As an example, they needed a lot of proxy servers. Instead of just using a proxy service, there was a fleet of ec2 instances.
    - maccard 6mo ago
      If all you have is AWS credits suddenly every problem looks like EC2.
4nonverbal-alit 6mo ago
At my current team at a “bigcorp” I have noticed a similar pattern. We use aws not because it’s efficient in any way. We use it because we don’t want to deal with slow procurement process. It kills all the momentum.
- maccard 6mo ago
  Exactly. I want to set up elastic search - I can either have procurement go through their sales, or be up and running via the marketplace in less time than it would take me to fill in the RFQ form to send to procurement.
hibikir 6mo ago
Many a big company migrated because they have those very same slow procurement problems with internal data centers. I saw multiple cloud migrations because internal friction was at a level that the price didn't matter: 6 months for the smallest VM kind of thing. Very adversarial relationships, often with very poor incentives, as the service setup costs for other business units were way inflated, but then the maintenance costs didn't pay enough. Paying 3x-4x more a year for just a semblance of reliability was seen as a big plus.

by maccard 6mo ago

xmcp123 6mo ago

Have seen this repeatedly also. Watched one company end up with a $250k AWS bill when their credits expired (which they could not pay).

maccard 6mo ago
If you let it go that far then you were going to blow it one way or another - it’s not an excuse to totally ignore the cloud spend but it’s a n excuse to defer it to a later date. If your successful, fix it, if your not then AWS aren’t getting paid anyway!
- xmcp123 6mo ago
  Yeah, they had an impossible to use number of credits (YC) until they expired, so every problem became a AWS solution. As an example, they needed a lot of proxy servers. Instead of just using a proxy service, there was a fleet of ec2 instances.
  - maccard 6mo ago
    If all you have is AWS credits suddenly every problem looks like EC2.

4nonverbal-alit 6mo ago

At my current team at a “bigcorp” I have noticed a similar pattern. We use aws not because it’s efficient in any way. We use it because we don’t want to deal with slow procurement process. It kills all the momentum.

maccard 6mo ago
Exactly. I want to set up elastic search - I can either have procurement go through their sales, or be up and running via the marketplace in less time than it would take me to fill in the RFQ form to send to procurement.

hibikir 6mo ago

Many a big company migrated because they have those very same slow procurement problems with internal data centers. I saw multiple cloud migrations because internal friction was at a level that the price didn't matter: 6 months for the smallest VM kind of thing. Very adversarial relationships, often with very poor incentives, as the service setup costs for other business units were way inflated, but then the maintenance costs didn't pay enough. Paying 3x-4x more a year for just a semblance of reliability was seen as a big plus.