Hard to take seriously and barely rises to the level necessary for rational debate. Is there a workload that is demonstrably 100x slower on AWS or GCE compared to the fully-loaded cost of bare metal?
The TechEmpower benchmarks showed roughly a 10x difference in performance between AWS and bare-metal for basic webserving + DB, across many different languages and frameworks:
OK but that's a comparison of a $3200 machine with 7x more CPU and more than double the memory of the $100/month virtual machine. The operating costs of the metal machine (electricity, repairs) and its lifetime are unstated.
to be fair techempower benchmarks are not really "world comparable".
it's still just a benchmark. I know a lot of people take these benchmarks as their bread and butter, but there are so many "perf" hacks in them and they do not really have a lot in common with real world usage.
The author was largely focused on specific implementations over architecture patterns, so I wouldn’t think they’re operating at a level where TCO is a consideration...
"Well optimized MySQL" sounds a bit like having a really attractive liver cancer. Cloud services expand your options and it's worth pondering them. Don't ask what is the best MySQL, ask for a given amount of items I need to store and recall what is the best server OR SERVICE that could do it? MySQL on bare metal? On virtual machines? RDS? Cloud Spanner?
Do cloud providers increase your ability to choose scale-up instead of scale-out? Instead of your sharded and replicated MySQL that is almost inoperable and never seems to maintain consistency, would you be better served with one gigantic database? Sure it costs $13k/month to rent one from Google but it costs a quarter million to buy one from Dell. These are all aspects of the decision-making process.
MySQL-RDS is the AWS service which I felt gave me the least value for the dollar. (Except for the OpenVPN server which went nuts and did an obscene number of I/Os against EBS which ran up my bill)
https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r18&hw=...