[awaythrow98765]

> If your business invests in physical servers anticipating strong growth next year then later finds out actually we're going into a recession and those servers are no longer needed, then that's a sunk cost.

Cloud vendors also mostly sell minimum use packages for discounts in the range of 20 to 80% (called e.g. "committed use discount" or "compute savings plan"). Lots of businesses use those, because two-digit discounts are real money, but they might find themselves in the same spot as with physical hardware they don't need...

[steveBK123]

Yup, and you are paying the premium of cloud forever, which over some vanilla compute & storage can be a lot.

And cloud proponents pretend data center / rack space / server leasing doesn't exist either, for those trying to avoid large up front costs.

[Jochim]

I'm a cloud proponent because it means not having to sit through hours of meetings to deploy a $5/mo virtual machine.

It also means some poor fuck at AWS gets woken up in the middle of the night instead of me when things go to shit.

It absolutely comes at a cost, and might not be the right fit for an organisation that's absolutely on top of it's hardware requirements and can afford to divert resources from new development work. For the rest of us it saves a lot of dev hours that would have otherwise been spent in pointless meetings or debating the best implementation of whatever half-baked stack has oozed it's way out of the organisation in an attempt to replicate what's handed to you with a cloud solution.

[awaythrow98765]

> I'm a cloud proponent because it means not having to sit through hours of meetings to deploy a $5/mo virtual machine.

And endless orgies of "call for pricing" with hardware vendors and hosting. Shitty websites where you can buy preconfigured servers somewhat cheaply, or vendor websites where you can configure everything but overpay. Useless sales-droids trying to "value-add" stuff on top.

Cloud buys are a lot friendlier, because you only have the one cloud vendor to worry about. Entry level you just pay list price by clicking a button. If you buy a lot, you are big enough to have your own business people to hammer out a rebate on list price, still very easy, still very simple. But overall still more expensive unfortunately.

[jjav]

> I'm a cloud proponent because it means not having to sit through hours of meetings to deploy a $5/mo virtual machine.

I'd hope there aren't actually hours of meetings for a single $5/mo VM?

But I would hope there are reviews and meetings when deploying enough of these to amount to real money. Companies that don't do that soon enough find themselves with a million dollar AWS bill without understanding what's going on.

Spend is spend, it's vital to understand what is being spent on what and why.

[Jochim]

> I'd hope there aren't actually hours of meetings for a single $5/mo VM?

Slightly exaggerated in the case of the $5 machine, probably 2-3 manhours total but it took 4 days for it to be deployed instead of ~5 minutes. We did spent tens of hours justifying why the business should spend ~$100 more per month on a production system where the metrics clearly indicated that it was resource constrained.

The same IT department that demanded we justify every penny spent did not apply any of that rigour to their own spending. Control over the deployment of resources was used as a political tool to increase their headcount.

> I would hope there are reviews and meetings when deploying enough of these to amount to real money. Companies that don't do that soon enough find themselves with a million dollar AWS bill without understanding what's going on.

I consider the judicious use of resources to be part of my job as a software engineer. A development team that isn't considering how they can reduce spend, tidy up, or right-size their resources is a massive red flag to me. Organisations frequently shoot themselves in the foot by shifting that responsibility away from the development team. The result is usually factional infighting and more meetings.

[jabradoodle]

It's not really the same spot in that your paying monthly rather than upfront. Devs tend to think about total $, the business/accountants do care about Opex vs Capex.

Also it's going to be simpler to provision your base (commited use) on the cloud and then handle bursts on the cloud, than it is to have your base on prem and burst to the cloud.

[adql]

> It's not really the same spot in that your paying monthly rather than upfront. Devs tend to think about total $, the business/accountants do care about Opex vs Capex.

You can buy physical servers in leasing ,turning it into opex

You can also rent them for little bit extra via managed dedicated servers from vendors like OVH.

[runlaszlorun]

I think this point isn’t made often enough.

Not going with a big cloud provider def doesn’t mean that you need to buy physical servers and build an on-prem data center.

[adql]

And other point I also seen used to lie about cloud cost is saying you save so much on engineers.

...while forgetting to have sane on-call rotation for cloud you also need at least 3 people on that rotation that are also clued in on cloud operation enough. Sure they can be "developers" but if your app architecture requires so little maintenance and flea removal that they are not doing ops jobs much, chances are so would it in either rented or dedicated server env.

[awaythrow98765]

That is not really a difference, you may as well lease your server farm in the basement, practically the same cost as buying it, just as a monthly payment with the supposed "advantages" the business people might care about.