| I think it's because people think their workloads are extremely spiky, and so assume they will spin up/down loads enough to save money, and that has translated into cloud being perceived as cheap. But devs rarely pay attention to metrics. I've had clients with expensive Datadog setups where it was blatantly obvious that nobody had ever dug into the performance data, because if they did they'd have noticed that key metrics were simply not fed to it. If they did pay attention, most of them would realise that their autoscaling rarely kicks in all that much, if at all. Often because it's poorly tuned, but also because most businesses see small enough daily cycles. Factor in that the cost difference between instances vs. managed servers is quite significant, and you need to have significant spikes much shorter in duration than most businesses day/night variation to save money. It can make sense to be able to spin up more capacity quickly, but then people need to consider that 1) a lot of managed hosting providers has hardware standing by and can automatically provision it for you rapidly too - unless you insist on only using your own purchased servers in a colo, you can get additional capacity quickly, 2) a lot of managed hosting providers also have cloud instances so you can mix and match, 3) worst case you can spin up cloud instances elsewhere and tie it into your network via a VPN. Some offer the full range from colo via managed servers to cloud instances in the same datacentres. Once you prep for a hybrid setup, incidentally, cloud becomes even less competitive, because suddenly you can risk pushing the load factor on your own/managed servers much closer to the wire, knowing you can spin up cloud instances as a fallback. As a result, the cost per request for managed servers drops significantly. I also blame a lot of this on business often shielding engineering from seeing budgets and costs. I've been in quite senior positions in a number of companies where the CEO or CFO were flabbergasted when I asked for basics costing of staff and infra, because I saw it as essential in planning out architecture. Engineers who aren't used to seeing cost as part of their domain will never have a good picture of costs. |