[ti_ranger]

> For my own startup, I built a small cluster of 17 servers for just beneath $55K, and that had a month-to-month expense of $600 placed in a co-lo. In comparison, the same setup at AWS would be $96K per month.

Why would you build exactly the same setup in AWS as for on-prem, unless your objective is to (dishonestly) show that on-prem is cheaper?

Lift-and-shift-to-the-cloud is known to be more expensive, because you aren't taking advantage of the features available to you which would allow you to reduce your costs.

[bsenftner]

> Why would you build exactly the same setup in AWS as for on-prem...

It was far better to invest a little up front, and maintain at $600 my operations than the same for $96K a month, that's why.

I never "lifted and shifted", I built and deployed, with physical servers, a 3-way duplicated environment that flew like a hot rod. At a fraction of cloud's expense.

[necovek]

I think the point GP was making is that you could have likely started off much cheaper, eg. with 2k/month of AWS costs before needing to "simply" scale at eg. 12 months, especially so if using managed services and not just bare ec2 instances.

I personally think there's room for both, and I think hybrids between on-prem and cloud are the ideal for long running apps: you size your on-prem infrastructure to handle 99% of the load, and scale to the cloud for that one-off peak.

That's still pretty complicated due to different types of vendor lock in (or lock out in some cases). Google has invested in k8s to get people some value for moving away from AWS.

[bsenftner]

My application had (still would have) very high CPU requirements, and 2k/month would have got me spending more money than necessary. When I started I bought 1 server with the capacity I needed and put that in co-lo for $75 a month. That little puppie was equal to $10K a month at AWS, so why would I want to use AWS again? Just do the math, even 1 server out performs and is exponentially less expensive. The cloud has the majority of engineers looking like morons from a financial literacy perspective.

[srtjstjsj]

Are you claiming that you knew exactly how powerful you needed your machines to be, before you launched? Or are your machines running at 25% utilization which AWS would charge substantially less for?

[bsenftner]

I'm not making any such claim. I'm saying I built a 24-7 available physical 17-server cluster to operate my startup's needs. I had more capacity than I needed, but at the same expense thru AWS I'd not have enough to operate. At less than the expense of one AWS month, I had my entire environment owned outright. How is that difficult to understand?