[nimbius]

is it just me or is about 65% of the AWS customer experience dealing with cost and implementing clever workarounds to reduce spending? wouldnt it make more sense to just shop around and use a different cloud provider? vultr? ramnode? alicloud?

[acdha]

I don't think it's that simple: AWS offers a ton of higher-level services — if you just need a Linux VM, yes, you have many options — but otherwise you're getting into tradeoffs like how many hours of human time it's worth spending to build the equivalent of a managed service. This can look like you're spending more because you get an itemized bill from AWS every month but you rarely get your staff time broken down like that and especially do not get an itemized report of what they could have been working on instead.

That's not saying that the right answer is AWS: simply that you really need to balance your budget against your time and capacity. For example, ALBs are “just” load-balancing — but if you try to build your own system with automatic failover and scaling, the various tools for logging, security, etc. it'll cost a lot more than $16/month. Now, if you're running 1,000 ALBs maybe that might no longer be true — but I would bet that you have other tasks for your engineers which would see comparable or greater returns, so it's still a business decision.

[kiklion]

Sounds like AWS is incredibly simple to use if you have your developers trying to minimize costs instead of actually getting it to work. Which is a lot better than other products out there which may be cheaper but end up not working as advertised after spending half a year ‘integrating’.

[marcosdumay]

"Incredibly simple to use" compared to what?

How hard is it to get the same functionality out of a set of rented servers? Or a fully hosted level-7 IaS? Or a fast starting VPS park?

The allegedly benefit of AWS is that you just focus on development, and let Amazon handle all the OPS noise. Well, minimizing costs is a lot of OPS noise.

[PaywallBuster]

They could re implement the solution in AWS to use Serverless

Only pay per requests: API Gateway/Lambda/Dynamo

Then there's no fixed costs or the need to share these services with unrelated services.

Works great for dev/staging environments (will probably cost 1$ per month each for low usage) and even prod could go a long way before becoming "expensive"

(We're doing that a lot in my company, the CDN caches 85% of requests coming to our serverless stack, with most responses having only 1/2 min cache times)

[majormajor]

I don't think "what people write about" is the same as the majority of the experience.

You work on cost-cutting after everything else is working. It's usually a sign you like the service well enough - if you didn't like it, maybe you're not cost cutting, you're trying to get it out of your stack.

If you like everything else about it, shopping around instead of doing cost optimization carries much larger risks.