[mattmanser]

This is not a real saving in my experience. The DevOps time for an app is so trivial. I actually just setup a .Net core app on Linux/mysql.

My Linux experience is old and very limited. I have used AWS for years for other things (S3, cloudfront, transcribe, etc.).

Initially I setup an elastic beanstalk app/separate mysql instance on my own AWS account just so I could quickly deploy (all new to me).

Then I setup the app on my client's VM, had to configure Apache, .net core app, service, mysql, mailing.

I would say the elastic beanstalk stuff took about 3 hours (some problems with IAM and Amazon's visual studio plugin, basically ended up having to use my master key). Setting up the VM server, plus a new way to deploying .net core apps and learning/relearning much of linux took 4-5?

So no significant savings there.

Deploys are a few clicks from VS on EB, and take a little longer to the VM, but only because I haven't bothered writing a script that I estimate would take me 1/2 hour at most, in reality probably 5 minutes.

I have clients on (windows) servers that have been running for 10 years with little intervention from me (had to clear some space a couple of times as that client's app saves large files just in case, but they are all backed up on S3 as well).

TL;DR; in my experience DevOps part of running a startup/small enterprise app is basically trivial, a rounding error, compared to time spent on development.

[WrtCdEvrydy]

To be fully honest, for personal work, I use Caprover for DevOps.

Edit: The move from CapEx to OpEx is not about savings, it's often about shifting the costs in your books.

[mattmanser]

I guess I phrased that wrong. Explicitly, DevOps costs are tiny in a startup, even if you do it all yourself with a bare metal server, and moving 0.5% from pot A to pot B makes no difference.

[qayxc]

It all depends on the services you provide.

Some businesses would require huge up-front investments without the likes of AWS. DevOps costs might overwhelm you pretty quickly once stuff like compliance becomes a factor, for example.

Sometimes it's not about the technical issues, but documentation, process and qualifications. In B2B there's plenty of that and just the bus factor [1] alone might force a start-up into considering a cloud provider.

In the end it's not just shifting cost, it's also shifting risk and standards and that may or may not be a critical factor.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor