[dangus]

It’s more than mere “convenience.” You’re also paying to avoid hiring a bunch of employees to physically visit data centers around the globe.

And if you’re not doing that you are hiring a bare metal servers provider that is still taking a portion of the money you’d be paying AWS.

Even if you don’t need to physically visit data centers thanks to your server management tools, the difference in the level of control you have between cloud and bare metal servers is large. You’re paying to enable workflows that have better automation and virtual networking capabilities.

I recently stood up an entire infrastructure in multiple global locations at once and the only reason I was able to do it in days instead of weeks or months was because of the APIs that Amazon provides that I can leverage with infrastructure automation tooling.

Once you are buying AWS reservations and avoiding their most expensive specialized managed products the price difference isn’t really worth trying to recover for many types of businesses. It’s probably worth it for Hey since they are providing a basic email service to consumers who aren’t paying a whole lot. But they still need something that’s “set it and forget it” which is why they are buying a storage solution that already comes with an S3 compatible API. So then I have to ask why they don’t save even more money and just buy Supermicro servers and install their own software? We all know why: because Amazon’s APIs are where the value is.

There is a lot of profit margin in software and usually your business is best spending their effort working on their core product rather than keeping the lights on, even for large companies. Plus, large companies get the largest discounts from cloud providers which makes data centers even less appealing.

“Convenience” isn’t just convenience, it’s also the flexibility to tear it all down and instantly stop spend. If I launch a product and it fails I just turn it off and it’s gone. Not so if I have my own data center and now I’ve got excess capacity.

[luckylion]

I agree, but I don't think you're in the majority. I don't think most cloud-customers are utilizing all of those additional things that a big cloud provider offers.

How many are actually multi-region? How many actually do massive up/down-scaling on short notice? How many actually use many of those dozens to hundreds of services? How many actually use those complex permissions?

My experience tells me there are some, but there are more who treat AWS/GPC/Azure like a VPS-hoster that's 5-10x more expensive than other hosters. They are not multi-region, they don't do scaling, they go down entirely whenever the AZ has some issues etc. The most they do is maybe use RDS instead of installing mysql/pgsql themselves.

[scarface_74]

I can’t speak too much for small companies. But there are a lot of large enterprises and smaller businesses and government agencies that do use more AWS services than just compute + storage + web services. Do need the elasticity etc.

For instance, I was surprised how large the market was for Amazon Connect - Amazon’s hosted call centers. It’s one of the Amazon services I have some experience in and I still get recruiters contacting me for those jobs even though I don’t really emphasize that specialty.

My experience is from 7 years of working with AWS. First at a startup with a lot of complex ETL and used a lot of services. But the spend wasn’t that great.

My next 5 years was between working at AWS (Professional Services) and two years at a a third party consulting company (full time) mostly as an implementation lead.

Even though my specialty is “cloud native application development” and I avoid migrations like the plague, most of the money in cloud consulting are large companies deciding to move to the cloud because they decided that the redundancy, lower maintenance overhead, and other higher level services were worth it.

[dangus]

A lot more than you’re giving them credit for.

This idea that their basic users go down entirely when the AZ has some issues is ridiculous, a standard autoscaling group and load balancer basically forces you to be multi-AZ. Very much unlike a VPS.

Using RDS instead of self-installing SQL eliminates the need for an entire full time role for DB admin. So that’s kind of a big deal despite it being a “basic” use case.

A lot of services like ECS, elastic beanstalk, can make it so that you can wait longer to hire operations people and when you do they can migrate to more scalable solutions without having to do a major migration to some other provider or build up a self hosted solution custom. If you outgrow a VPS you have to do a major migration.

And if you take a look at the maturity and usefulness of the terraform providers SDKs, and other similar integrations of VPS and bare metal providers they are very basic when comparing to BOTO and the terraform provider.

I struggle to replicate the level of automation I can achieve with these cloud tools on my own homelab with Proxmox.

[bigfatkitten]

> Using RDS instead of self-installing SQL eliminates the need for an entire full time role for DB admin.

No it doesn't. The value in a skilled DB admin is not in keeping the DB up and running, because no special skills are required to do that; the DB admin is an expert in performance. They add considerable value in ensuring you get the most bang for your buck from your infrastructure.

A popular modern alternative to this of course is to throw more money at RDS until your performance problems go away.

[sgarland]

Amen. How this lie continues to be perpetuated as gospel is beyond me.

I can look at any company’s RDBMS who doesn’t have a full-time DB[A,RE] on staff and find ten things wrong very quickly. Duplicate indices, useless indices, suboptimal column types, bad or completely absent tuning, poor query performance…

It’s only when a company hits the top end of vertical scaling do they think, “maybe we should hire someone,” and the problem then is that some changes are extremely painful at that scale, and they don’t want to hear it.

[dangus]

Yes it does.

While you’re not wrong about DB admins being important for performance optimizations, RDS stops you from having an inexperienced administrator lose data in stupid ways.

I know because I used to be that stupid person. You don’t want to trust your company’s data to a generalist that you told to spin up a database they’ve never configured before (me) and hope they got good answers when they googled how to set up backups/snapshots/replication.

[j45]

Multi AZ is as much planning as anything else.

IaaS (Proxmox) is a different layer than PaaS as we know.

The same orchestration tools (Terraform) can orchestrate Proxmox or other hypervisors just fine. Discounted licenses for VMware are readily available on ebay if that is preferred.

Proxmox has built-in node mirroring between multiple servers, it just works after it's connected.

[bigfatkitten]

> How many are actually multi-region?

The fact half the internet seems to fall over whenever us-east-1 has a hiccup is quite telling.

[j45]

This might be a little incomplete.

It's trivial, to get equipment at a datacenter, where the equipment is visited for you on your behalf if you wish.

You can place your own equipment in a datacenter to manage yourself (dedicated servers).

You can have varying amounts of the hardware up to the software layer managed for you as a managed server, where others on site will do certain tasks.

Both of these can still be cheaper than cloud (which provides a convenience and a large markup to make often open source tools easy to administer from a web browser), and then paying someone to manage the cloud.

Global location at once can still be done with the reality of hybrid-cloud or cloud-agnostic setup requirements (not to be tied to one cloud only for fallback and independence).