[jahrichie]

I'm no AWS fanboy, and sure its not the cheapest out there, but this is assuming that all cloud providers provide the same level of services for their machines, which is a complete joke. There are OS, Software, security, ease of tools, even speed of scale considerations that have more to do with why 90% of the internet is on AWS lol. There's a reason the only approved government cloud for years has been AWS. Also, heads up, AWS also offers far more services than ALL of those other providers you mentioned. So when you actually start running a real ONLINE business, and need ETL, MUTLI-AZ, WHAREHOUSEING, AUTOSCALE, S3, ETC, all those things talk to each other out of the box and your vendor list doesn't go from 1 to 50.

[birdyrooster]

Why bother locking in when Kubernetes operators and resources can deploy and maintain the lifecycle of common services? Why would I want some old, forked version of elasticsearch (for example) when I can have the latest version automatically provisioned and scaled with high availability?

What is the AWS value add as Kubernetes operators become mature? They own datacenter space and have contracts for power and internet.

[Aeolun]

I think you answered your own question.

> As kubernetes operators become mature

This implies (and I agree) that they’re not mature yet.

Aside from that, there is still more to maintain on kubernetes than on AWS. Those pods don’t patch themselves...

[birdyrooster]

I agree we are in a transition period and that more maturity is needed for penetration but we are already underway. If you are an executive planning for the next 5 years, this is one of your goals for your engineering organization.

[asdfman123]

And it's just comparing virtual machines. I don't work at a big tech co -- I'm an enterprise dev working at smaller shops -- and I will try my best to never use virtual machines again.

I want serverless options, I want message queues that scale out of the box, I want stuff that lets me try different k8s configurations.

And I haven't done any research so I guess it's unfair for me to speculate, but will the small guys be guaranteed to be around in 5-10 years? I'm sure Azure, AWS and GCP aren't going anywhere any time soon.

So the comparison means nothing to me. Getting more hosting is way easier than getting new programmers. I'm going the lowest maintenance route I can, provided the costs are somewhat reasonable. I'm willing to pay a premium because stability and easy-to-use features is what I care about.

[hurricanetc]

I think the point is that many AWS customers aren’t doing all of that and still assume they are saving money.

I would finger in the wind guess that a majority of AWS customers are just renting servers and storage and not even scratching the surface of the usefulness of the platform. Just my guess.

[asdfman123]

Sure they aren't, but they don't want it to be a big hassle when it turns out a few years later, they actually need those features.

My employer is okay with paying an extra $10k/mo for stability and predictability.

[scarface74]

We don’t assume we are saving money. We are a smallish B2B company. We are far more concerned with being able to scale up when a new client can increase our load (and revenue) noticeably.

The money we save by not having someone babysitting infrastructure and the speed we can move at is well worth it. One client contract basically pays our entire infrastructure bill and then some and we have 30 clients. If we had to hire one Devops person it would be about the same as our yearly bill if not slightly more.