[jillesvangurp]

The cost of three person months for a reasonably competent devops person is probably close to 50000$. Maybe a bit less for a cocky junior one that will make a mess and a bit more if you pay premium freelance rates for somebody less likely to botch the job. That pays for a lot of infrastructure. Not counting your own cost is a rookie mistake. And not realizing you really need 4-6 of these people to be able to get to your five nines is the second mistake (you need people on call 24x7 and when they are sick, over Christmas, etc). So, the real cost would be closer to 1M/year. Just staffing to babysit stuff you build manually ... or you pay Amazon, Google, etc. and you just worry about your own application not crashing. That's why this is so popular.

Few companies actually need that many instances. The math for the less than 10-20 instances the vast majority of companies actually need is quite brutal. A day of your time basically pays for months/years of hosting. The thing to optimize is devops time. Not hosting cost. It's by far the most expensive thing and also the most likely thing to fail on you (by leaving, by being incompetent, negligent, lazy, sick, etc.) and also the hardest thing to source when you need more of it. Good devops people are scarce.

I've dealt with plenty of companies that had no more than two or three idling t2 instances paying for multiple devops people to babysit that "infrastructure". It's stupid and wasteful. A decent devops person costs about 0.5-1 instance year (i.e. a full year of hosting 24x7) per hour for such small instances. And scaling an instance group from 2 to 500 instances is a 1 minute job if you ever need to. Unless the savings are enormous, the time they spend on minimizing the number of instances or automating their deployment will never be worth the money. It's money down the drain. You need to think in terms of a few hours for getting stuff done to make it worth the cost. Anything more is probably too expensive.

[Sebb767]

> And not realizing you really need 4-6 of these people to be able to get to your five nines is the second mistake (you need people on call 24x7 and when they are sick, over Christmas, etc).

If you need that kind of availability, you need to have people on call anyway to babysit your app. A good infrastructure (unless built to the minimal price point) will handle nearly all cases of hardware failure automatically, without someone having to wake up, so it's not likely to put additional load on those people.

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with your overall point, but if you need five nines, you're talking about an entirely different league of infrastructure compared to people who need two or three VMs that could also be handled by a NUC somewhere in the office (which will amortize itself against AWS in a few months).