[GabeIsko]

You are vastly overestimating the IT capabilities of most companies. The human time and energy cost that you handwaved away is a real killer because that is expert knowledge capability that is highly valued by the market. Maintaining an IT staff and infrastructure to support a large organization that has to perform any kind of reasonable SLA for services eventually puts you in direct competition with Major Cloud Providers at scale. A scenario where you can outcompete them with their large customer bases becomes very difficult to imagine under current technological and market conditions.

It's not a matter of outsourcing culture. Cloud providers really do provide computing in a cost efficient matter since they practically provide IT infrastructure at wholesale, and it produces an anti-trust risk because, as you pointed out, the actual hardware that can make it go is not nearly as expensive.

[pdimitar]

I am not handwaving anything away. We're a company that has less but very strong programmers (we don't even have DevOps / sysadmins, our CTO is doing it and I'll likely be taking part of his responsibilities at one point).

And we don't have the requirements of most big Silicon Valley companies that you reference. It boggles my mind why so many commenters IMMEDIATELY assumed we're a hyper-growth startup or whatever. We're an expanding data provider and our growth is super predictable, and our set of requirements changes like once a year.

So really, not sure why you and others keep repeating things I already agree with. The cloud wins from one point / scale and on, absolutely; otherwise it wouldn't ever take off. I am saying that people give up way too quickly and run to the cloud long before they need it -- that's all.

[GabeIsko]

If running your tech stack on local hardware is right for you guys, than more power to you. That is also what works for me for my personal and hobby computing requirements, where I maintain a home machine. But there is kind of an implication that most people who start developing on cloud services are just clueless programmers who never learned the basics of system provisioning.

Even with the specs you mentioned, you can rent a lightsail server that is comparable on AWS for like 80 usd a month, so I would push back against the idea that using cloud services in pretty much any scenario is a purely technical decision.

Part of the context of discussing things this way is the original article: do the prevalence of service companies signal the end of big tech? I would say no, because the only way to not be reliant cloud service providers is to do what you describe and compete directly with their infrastructure services by forming your own technical infrastructure. But the logical conclusion to doing things this way is that eventually whoever can control more physical infrastructure has an advantage. What if Amazon is able to replicate your service offerings? They would be able to immediately able to offer their version using their cloud services at a fraction of the price because they can amoratize the cost of computing over their cloud business. Then, when they have eliminated you as competition, they can recoup everything by increasing the price. This is a HUGE anti-trust concern, and one that all tech companies should be at least a little bit concerned about in the long term. It doesn't go away because you can have an (in your case more expensive than lightsail) up front investment to own your companies computing resources.

[pdimitar]

If they can do it at the fraction of the cost then I'd use it. Trouble is, AWS pricing is hard to parse, especially post factum. In my company's case, the leaders are not happy with the lack of billing transparency.

[GabeIsko]

I think that's not only a good reason not to use AWS, but also the fundamental problem with the position that cloud service providers pose. It would be much healthier for companies and organizations to directly own their own computing resources, rather than effectively leasing them from one of three cloud service providers, but it is absolutely more of an investment for companies to make.

[pdimitar]

Sure, agreed. I am on the opinion that Amazon does not have to be that monopoly-oriented but alas, humans being humans right?

Give me an AWS service with predictable billing and ability to put hard limits so you don't have your credit card charged for surprising amounts if you get bursty unexpected loads, and I'll be all over them without thinking of on-prem hosting.

[GabeIsko]

Honestly, I don't even think the billing is that untransparent - all their services have pretty straightforward pricing guidelines, and certain services are load limited (going to point out light sail again). It's pretty fair - you pay for what you use, and that works a lot better for most cases if you know what you are doing, you just take on a bit more risk that you have to guard against.

It would be a lot preferable for there to just be multiple computing resource providers, rather than just three, but the reality is that setting yourself up as a cloud provider is quite inaccessible. Democratizing the industry of cloud services will probably require regulation.

[dash2]

But you yourself admit that you have an unusual setup with a few very strong programmers. Few are like this even in Silicon Valley. As for other industries, they're not even close. So your company's setup won't transfer well to the rest of the world.

[pdimitar]

I would not be so sure of your last. The SV mold is the outlier but most USA programmers can't see it because they don't work for non-US companies. Everywhere I was all around the EU in my 20 years of career so far, the SV way of doing things has not been the norm.

So it pays off to be wary of filter bubbles. The SV way of doing things assumes a ton of VC money to burn, something that, to this day, is still not a wide trend in the EU (even if it happens here and there).

Plus that company's setup is not unusual in any way per se; the only "unusual" thing is "we don't run to the cloud at the first IT problem". A ton of other companies are like this, I'd bet even in the US.