[politelemon]

This is a weird read. The analysis makes the classic mistake of assuming a lift-and-shift calculation. Of course that's going to be more expensive. You save money by re-architecting and using more managed services.

Which makes me scratch my head at the concluding statement:

> A cloud is convenient and locked in.

Everything is a lock-in. But in the case they've described, which is just shifting from VMs to EC2s, it is the exact same thing, there is no lock-in from their perspective other than to use the phrase as a boogeyman.

[sgarland]

I hear that all the time, but I don’t see how it’s true. Have you priced RDS vs. an EC2? It isn’t even close. You’re paying for the convenience. Not to mention the massive speed loss you take with the increased latency of EBS.

[deadfece]

I've worked places where they had so many databases from M&A that half of their FTEs were wholly preoccupied all year with performing outstanding DB maintenance: fixing backups, doing storage management, patches, applying move/add/changes.

For them, managed DBMS was a life-changing event. As soon as they had RDS or even Azure SQL MI, they were begging the cloud team for more, so they could get their team back.

In some businesses, it's definitely not a big loss to lose agility by having a large portion of your team tangled up in infrastructure management, but for some businesses, that constraint is an impediment to their line of business. Some businesses are missing opportunities for want of infrastructure being able to move fast enough.

[sgarland]

Much of that can be automated (how do you think AWS does it?), but I get the point. Still, the OP said: "You save money by re-architecting and using more managed services." To me, that isn't implying "save money from personnel costs," it's discussing pure service cost.

[deadfece]

That maintenance problem is sometimes also expensive in terms of service costs. Which is more of a tech debt problem than a cloud comparison, honestly, but they're often inseparable.

Extended support costs on old hardware and software are sometimes astronomical. Then you're paying all of that to get something that, compared to modern gear, performs like ass and just breaks all the time.

I've also had C-suites tell me I have two months to start a project and have all the gear live, but I find we are only allowed to order direct from the manufacturer, and our orders will take 90 days to get to our door. Oh boy. That scenario is difficult to put into terms of money. Sometimes having that one-hop instant supply chain into a cloud service is a huge business enabler, sometimes it's not.

[sgarland]

I regret to inform you that you can also incur extended support costs with managed services.

[deadfece]

Ah, I thought we were having a discussion in good faith. Later!

[bcaxis]

> You save money by re-architecting and using more managed services.

Managed services are more expensive, not less, per unit compute, per operation, etc. How exactly does that make things magically cheaper?

[silverquiet]

Re-architecting is also very far from free and the result of spending all that developer time is that you are indeed then hard locked into your provider's managed offerings. But even lift-and-shift will have some lock in. The classic is the egress bandwidth roach motel model; free to enter but expensive to leave.