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by alberth 1636 days ago
When people talk about the cost of cloud, there’s some assumptions we need to state:

A. Does your workload fully utilize 100% of the capacity of the resource? If not, then cloud would be cheaper. Just like if you only need office space for a few people, it’s not cost effective to buy an entire office building. If you only need server with a few gigs of RAM, it’s not cost effective to buy (own) an entire physical server.

B. If you are going to fully utilize a resource and don’t want to purchase/own it - then a service provider needs to provide that asset to you around cost and make margin from the efficiency from scale they have. Example, it’s actually more expensive for me to buy all of the ingredients to make a hamburger than to simply buy a fully prepared hamburger for McDonalds. McDonald’s is able to provide this due to their scale.

What I’ve seen is that when you’re in Group B, many people are finding that AWS/etc is way more expensive. Essentially, their scale in efficiency is not being passed down to the customer in cost savings. And the sizable cost premium is not worth the value received in return.

I’ll give a good example of where this does make sense, and that’s Hetzner or OVH. Their scale allows them to procure & host dedicated servers at a price I’d be difficult to match doing it myself. Or even if I could beat their price, it would be minimally. But folks are finding that with AWS/etc, that premium is extreme and that’s where the equation is unbalanced for folks.

2 comments

McDonald's is a pretty good example. For one, cheap burger they can provide it to you for cheaper. As soon as you start asking for quantity or quality though, you quickly realize you can make it yourself for cheaper, not counting your time.

At that point, the question becomes how much is your time worth, or in this analogy, are you ready to hire a professional chef to get better quality food?

There are also a lot of people who think they are in group A, move to the cloud and find out they are much closer to group B.