[Silhouette]

Developers are expensive, very expensive.

Such is the accepted wisdom in much of the industry, but I'm a bit of a sceptic on this score. Of course developer time is expensive, particularly if you're in somewhere like the Bay Area where salaries are an extra 0 compared to most of the world. But we live in an era of virtualisation and outsourcing (sorry, "cloud computing") when businesses will knowingly pay many times the cost of just buying a set of servers and sticking them in a rack in order to have someone else buy a much bigger server, subdivide it into virtual servers, and lease them at a huge mark-up. All kinds of justifications have been given for this, many of which I suspect don't stand up to scrutiny anywhere other than boardrooms and maybe golf courses.

There's a nice write-up somewhere, though regrettably I can't immediately find it, of the economics of cloud-hosting an application built using modern trends. IIRC, it pitched typical auto-scaling architectures consisting of many ephemeral VMs running microservices and some sort of orchestration to manage everything against just buying a small number of highly specified machines and getting on with the job using a more traditional set of skills and tools. Put another way, it was the modern trend for making everything extremely horizontally scalable using more hardware and virtualisation against a more traditional vertical scaling approach using more efficient software to keep within the capacity of a small number of big machines. The conclusion was astonishingly bad for the modern/trendy case, to the point where doing it was looking borderline insane unless your application drops into a goldilocks zone in terms of capacity and resources required that relatively few applications will ever get near, and those that do may then move beyond it on the other side. And yet that horizontal scaling strategy is viewed almost as the default today for many new software businesses, because hiring people who are good enough to write the more efficient software is assumed to be too expensive.

[asdff]

We live in a world where any 1 man startup thinks and their investors hope they will have 10k employees by year end. Therefore, if you are going to be burning money anyway, what's another line item on the monthly outflow if it means you don't have to spend 3 months hiring someone to toil in the server room and a couple months ordering and assembling your farm that might crash the day your startup gets linked on hacker news.

There are technical reasons for this, being able to handle sudden load, but mostly it's for ideological reasons. We aren't building companies, we are building stock pumps guised as the utopian future. If you are wondering what a blue chip company looks like in tech, they are the ones that own their own infrastructure.

Maybe there is a middle road for cash poor companies, where you keep latent demand in house for the sake of cost and sense, but have some sort of insurance policy with a cloud service to step in if demand surges.