[flibble]

I do like watching these comparisons however it reminds me of a conversation I had recently with my 10 year old.

Son: Why does the croissant cost €2.80 here while it's only €0.45 in Lidl? Who would buy that?

Me: You're not paying for the croissant, you're paying for the staff to give it to you, for the warm café, for the tables to be cleaned and for the seat to sit on.

[baxtr]

Good example.

I also like the "why does a bottle of water cost $5 after security at airports" example.

You have no choice. You’re locked in and can’t get out.

Maybe that’s the better analogy?

[Ekaros]

Also. Your company is paying. You are not.

So for enough people the price is not an issue. Someone else is paying.

On other side. People are pretty bad at this sort of cost analysis. I fall on this issue, prefer to spend more time myself on something I should just recommend to buy.

[szszrk]

On point.

We don't pay million $ bills on AWS to "hang out" in a cozy place. I mean, you can, but that's insanity.

[whstl]

The people cleaning and keeping the café warm are your Ops team.

AWS is just an extremely expensive Lidl.

EDIT: autocorrect typo, coffee to café

[auggierose]

He means the location, not the fluid. My coffee better be hot, not warm.

[whstl]

Typo.

[spwa4]

Exactly. The whole promise behind cloud was "you don't need an ops team". Now go check for yourself if that's true: go to your favorite jobs portal and search for AWS, or to include Azure and Github sysadmins search for "devops engineer". And for laughs search for "IAM engineer", which is a job only about managing permissions for users (not deciding about permissions, JUST managing them and fixing problems, nothing more. And frankly, the cloud is to blame: figuring out correct permissions now requires teams of PhDs to do correctly on infuriating web interfaces. I used to think Active Directory permissions were bad. I was wrong. The job portals show: no corporate department should ever go without a team of IAM engineers who are totally not really sysadmins)

What do you get for this? A redundant database without support (because while AWS support really tries so hard to help that I feel bad saying this, they don't get time to debug stuff, and redundant databases are complicated whether or not you use the cloud). You also get S3 distributed storage, and serverless (which is kind of CGI, except using docker and AWS markups to make one of most efficient stateless ways to run code on the web really expensive). Btw: for all of these better open source versions are available as a helm chart, with effectively the same amount of support.

You can use vercel to get out from under this, but that only works for small companies' "I need a small website" needs. It cannot do the integration that any even medium sized company requires.

Oh, and you get Amazon TLA, which is another brilliant amazon invention: during the time it takes you to write a devops script Amazon TLA comes up with another three-letter AWS service that you now have to use, because one of the devs wants it on his resume, is 2x as expensive as anything else, doesn't solve any problem and you now have to learn. It's all about using AI for maximizing uselessness.

And you'll do all this on Amazon's patented 1994-styled webpages because even claude code doesn't understand the AWS CLI. And the GCP and Azure ones are somehow worse (their websites look a lot nicer though, I'll readily admit that. But they're not significantly more functional)

Conclusion: while cloud has changed the job of sysadmin somewhat, there is no real difference, other than a massive price increase. Cloud is now so expensive that, for a single month's cloud services, you can buy hardware and put it on your desk. As the youtube points out, even an 8GB M1 mac mini, even a chinese mini-pc with AMD, runs docker far better than the (now reduced to 2GB memory) standard cloud images.

[4ndrewl]

I used to believe that, but in the enterprise we now we have teams on client-side cloud engineers to manage our AWS/Azure/GCP infra!

[jmaker]

More often than not, I’d rather avoid the self-focused staff who rarely give it to you with hygiene in mind and at this time of the year in the northern hemisphere are likely to be sick, the mediocre coffee (price surge in coffee beans), and the dirty tables at a café, and the uncomfortable seating. And it’s rather 5€ for the croissant alone, in many places these days. Lidl’s croissants aren’t very good but they’re only marginally less good than what you can hope for at a café. McDonald’s croissants in Italy are quite ok by the way.

[remus]

Me too, but it's worth remembering that's not the case for everyone. Some people want to have a little chat with the person at the counter, sit down for 5 mins in the corner of the cafe and eat their croissant. 5 euro can be a good price if that's what you want, and it doesn't matter if the lidl croissant is free, it will still be disappointing to the person who wants the extras.

[jmaker]

Absolutely. I believe what I wanted to convey is that there are trade-offs in every decision that you can make. Maybe that’s even the point of a decision in the first place.

This in turn means that you always have several options, and more importantly you can invent a new way to enjoy the experience you hope to get from that interaction at a café in your mind, maybe a scene from your past or from a movie, which you’re no longer as likely to experience on average.

That said, I’ve got a favorite café where I used to spend time frequently. But their service deteriorated. And the magic is gone. So I moved on with my expectations.

Back to the analogy with the hyperscalers. I had bad experience with Azure and GCP, I’ve experienced the trade-offs of DigitalOcean and Linode and Hetzner, and of running on-premises clusters. It turned out, I’m the most comfortable with the trade-offs that AWS imposes.

[boxed]

AWS feels more like Lidl though...

[stacktrace]

Exactly. AWS has its own quirks and frustrations, sure but at the end of the day, I’m not using AWS just for raw compute. I’m paying for the entire ecosystem around it: security and access management, S3, Lambda, networking, monitoring, reliability guarantees, and a hundred little things that quietly keep the lights on.

People can have different opinions on this, of course, but personally, if I have a choice, I'd rather not be juggling both product development and the infrastructure headaches that come with running everything myself. That trade-off isn’t worth it for me.