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by toomanybeersies
2877 days ago
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I literally had this discussion at work today about vendor lock in. with AWS Lambda. At my old job, we were terrible at wanting to use new shiny things (me included). We had terrible vendor lock-in with AWS, although it did make my resume look nice as I could fill it with fancy AWS products. My supervisor was discussing AWS Lambda with me at lunchtime, and I said that it's not worth it, because any cost savings from using Lambda over a server are outweighed by the cost if we ever wanted or needed to switch vendors. AWS lambda would make sense for large companies, where server time is more expensive than developer time. But for most companies, developer time is more expensive than server time, using shiny new AWS specific tools is just going to hurt later on. |
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I mean, sure, if you're doing something as a hobby and consider your own time free but have to pay $5 for a VM somewhere, then maybe.
But especially at large companies, my experience has always been that for any work done the cost of infrastructure is basically a rounding error compared to the cost of developer time. And that doesn't even begin to include the cost of support team time for the eternity that everything seems to need to be maintained for in larger companies.
As a recent example, I know that the amount each developer on a team I've worked on costs (not how much they are paid, all contractors from various companies), per person, more than it would cost to buy a mid range server, colocate it in a data center etc - per day. So after a year, if we just bought infrastructure instead of developer time, we could have had a handy ~15,000 mid range servers racked and ready to go.