How much would it cost to get someone dedicated to manage your bare metal infrastructure? In this day and age, where using ansible or terraform is considered close to the metal, how much would it cost you to manage your own server?
And what about scaling?
That's precisely the problem. Bare metal hosts are unbeatable in cost, but fixed costs render them too expensive for a startup. Then, when fixed costs start to become irrelevant, you need to factor in the cost of rearchitecting your solution.
Then, when both of those costs become irrelevant, you already have the entire team trained and experienced in using a cloud service provider.
As someone who has been that "someone dedicated to managing your bare metal infrastructure": It will typicall cost less than that "someone dedicated to ensuring your AWS setup is correct and works and handle all the regular config changes".
I know that first hand for having done both, and seeing how the AWS systems consistently earned me more money, and how rarely I had to deal with the bare metal (I've done anything from actual own hardware in colos to renting servers from places like Hetzner; when I was handling servers in two separate colos I spent on average a day a year in each of them, the rest was done by "remote hands" at the data centre)
> That's precisely the problem. Bare metal hosts are unbeatable in cost, but fixed costs render them too expensive for a startup. Then, when fixed costs start to become irrelevant, you need to factor in the cost of rearchitecting your solution.
Actually buying hardware is too expensive. But coloing leased hardware or renting on a month by month bases from a dedicated hosting provider costs about the same when you amortize over a three year period unless you're physically located somewhere with cheap land. E.g. I work out of London, and when I was doing this we eventually deprecated the own hardware in favour of renting from Hetzner because colo space in London was so much more expensive that the savings on the actual hardware couldn't make up for it.
> Then, when fixed costs start to become irrelevant, you need to factor in the cost of rearchitecting your solution.
Or you architect it properly from the start. I've done zero downtime migration between AWS, GCE and Hetzner. I've had systems that tied in cloud instances, VMs running on our own hardware, containers running on dedicated instances, and VMS on rented hardware, all tied into a single system. If you run everything in containers anyway, all you need to make that happen is a simple orchestration system and a reliable network overlay, and an architecture that ensures reliable replication of your data.
Once you've done that, you're free to pick and choose and migrate services as you please depending on cost and need, and it really is not that hard to get working - you already do most of the necessary planning if you are setting up a reproducible cloud setup anyway.
It's more complicated than that. Sometimes, the decision is not just in the engineers' hands. eg - our clients (airlines) would very much prefer we use AWS over the smaller, lesser known offering.
It's pretty common for Fortune 500 type companies to ask for all sorts of intrusive terms they perceive as a benefit to them. Indemnity, long net payment terms, penalties for missed SLA, etc. They could be specifying AWS in this case to reduce latency and/or avoid the internet as a dependency. Maybe the client side is on AWS already, or they already have high bandwidth / dual path via AWS direct connect, and don't wish to do that for a different provider.
The reward being that once you're in, they are too big and slow to ever move away from your product.
And what about scaling?
That's precisely the problem. Bare metal hosts are unbeatable in cost, but fixed costs render them too expensive for a startup. Then, when fixed costs start to become irrelevant, you need to factor in the cost of rearchitecting your solution.
Then, when both of those costs become irrelevant, you already have the entire team trained and experienced in using a cloud service provider.