[bravetraveler]

'accept vendor lock in, it'll save you the cost of engineers'

Routinely: oops, our API usage slipped and we mistakenly paid more than the staff to avoid this would cost

Keep fucking up, tech industry. My job role depends on it (SRE)

[belter]

The Tech Industry is well know for shunning the Price of Education, while rejecting the Cost of Ignorance.

[JackMorgan]

Maybe even shunning the reasonable Price of Education while paying the significant Costs of Ignorance.

[belter]

AWS has a three day course on the technicals of efficient cost management. Believe it or not...I heard is one of the least requested classes....

[wisemang]

Maybe by the time you need it you can’t afford to pay for it…

[sumtechguy]

Managing these things is a skillset too. You now have X VM's and Y' containers and Z storage things. You still get to manage them. It is easier but is not a zero cost which some people seem to think it is. I have one where it is basically internal and I am at my teams all the time 'clean up your mess'. Tons of PoC's spun up and just left laying around. Things that do millions of calls (to be fixed later). That sort of thing. A cloud abstracts one set of skills. But everything above that line is still on the groups to manage.

Cloud stuff is really alluring at first. Works for awhile then the costs become above what it would cost to run it yourself. Cloud is not a 'set it and forget it' sort of thing. You have to manage it too.

[bluGill]

Even in Germany you won't get an engineer for only $5k/month. You can get bad engineers in places like India for that, but good engineers cost more than that.

[ghaff]

When you have salaried staff, it's very easy to ignore their cost when they do various background work because it seems to happen for "free." That's not to say that cloud services are always a good value but it's also the case that it's easy to ignore the full cost of doing everything in-house.

[bravetraveler]

German companies for all their precision probably make more than one spending mistake, like we do over here.

There's asymmetry you aren't considering: one engineer can make/solve many problems. Not even all on either side.

To be clear: I'm not taking a dig at this specific case. Larger patterns. It's more nuanced than X of these or Y of those. I'm not arguing in your vacuum/hypothetical

There need-not be an increase in staff in a lot of cases. Just better, or different, staff. If I wanted to earnestly dissect/solve this I wouldn't have opened with snide jokes.

The engineers hired to stave expense tend to go on to create it

The positive spin is: 'get the engineers anyway, self-hosted or not'. They'll help you optimize $solution. My point is things are rarely this positive. Things can be optimized to the point of being non-optimal.