[xfactorial]

The whole business model is around “Optimization through custom tools”.

We can go with your idea, sure: a few months in, an Account Manager from the cloud provider shows up and says your bill could be reduced by 50% if you just adopt some changes, using their custom, super optimized tools (“minor changes” will be the mantra).

And now you have your own company looking back to you on how can they get those savings, people who don’t understand what a VM is and cannot differentiate salesforce from an elastic container, as everything is “cloud”, but heard “50% off”.

[walrus01]

Preventing this from happening requires a clued-in CTO and equivalent senior level leadership who can defend against such 'attack' methods and knows the difference between, for instance, paying a monthly recurring cost to host a Linux/KVM virtual machine and paying for some totally 'cloud' SaAs.

Further, it needs people in decision making roles who understand and value the strategic differences between having an infrastructure concept that is trapped in one provider's proprietary software tooling ecosystem (aws, azure, etc), vs things built on open standards that are portable.

[eddythompson80]

> Preventing this from happening requires a clued-in CTO and equivalent senior level leadership

Most CTOs (and increasingly M2s and M3s) I've met are what I call "box architects". You know the ones who love drawing boxes, moving one box inside another box, drawing a line between 2 boxes or changing a unidirectional arrow into a bidirectional one, then declaring the hard part is done and now we need any random engineer to implement that or "Is there an AWS service that does that? I just don't see the value in us doing it in house".

A "super optimized tools" is just a box that you swap for another box and the "minor changes" will be just a couple of arrows than need to change or another box to swap for another box. You get them to feel good about doing architect stuff plus the 10x reduction in the bill. They can always replace that box with another box later after all.

[kriberg]

We call those people PowerPoint architects. They haven't coded or built anything for so long, if ever, that they wouldn't even how to, by this point. The only tool they know is PowerPoint and their slides have more boxes with words than any big box store

[palmotea]

> Preventing this from happening requires a clued-in CTO and equivalent senior level leadership who can defend against such 'attack' methods and knows the difference between, for instance, paying a monthly recurring cost to host a Linux/KVM virtual machine and paying for some totally 'cloud' SaAs.

And the reality is eventually you'll get a clueless one, and everything will revert to the mean.

And the mean is heavily influenced by marketing propaganda.

[Muromec]

This is true, but making money in any business is constantly fighting against the entropy and regression to the mean. Also, maybe, just maybe it's an example of relative competitive advantage and paying more for the AWS is the right call.

[RobotToaster]

Do people actually take claims like that from glorified salesmen seriously?

If a car salesman told me I could save 50% of my fuel bill from driving their special car a certain way I'd laugh at them.

[throwaw12]

You are missing the timeline factor here.

2016 - lets use EC2, its just VM, we can move off

2018 - I see you are hosting your own PostgreSQL in EC2, you can use our managed solution

2020 - you are already using 18 our services (note, at this point you might still be using non-vendor products, like VMs, managed DB, and so on), why not use our IAM instead of rolling out your own auth.

2024 - you are now deeply locked, lets add more lock-in, why don't you use this tool to optimize your costs (welcome DynamoDB)

At this point, no one would ever question next tool from salesman. Because engineers see that company doesnt have strategy to move to another cloud, why should they reject this new tool?

also consider the people who are involved, a lot of times after 2 years you have totally new people in your team, they won't have context and constraints you had in the past when deciding to buy "just VM", they see it as "we already use AWS"

[izacus]

That. Also add the parts that engineers are terrified to their bones of moving elsewhere because they don't know how to use anything else and will act as extension of the salesman to make sure they don't need to learn anything.

[retired]

2025 - You start using Amazon S3 with pre-signed URLs and serve those directly to your customers. Great, now your customers are also locked into AWS.

[green7ea]

I had many conversations with a former boss about the Azure sales team. They would come in, say they can do it cheaper, simpler and better — he was immediately convinced.

I would do a calculation based on their public price plan and come up with a 5-10x price compared to the bare metal OVH solution that perfectly fit our use case. I would then ask the sales team where I made a mistake in my calculation and hear nothing back.

A few months later, they would come back with the same pitch and the whole process would repeat...

[SpicyLemonZest]

You'd be wrong to laugh at them, because different cars of the same general size can indeed vary 50% or more in fuel efficiency. It's fair to be skeptical of promises of huge savings, and question why your counterparty would benefit from giving you those savings, but sometimes there's a good reason.

[hermanzegerman]

Name one example of a 2026 car with the same size, fuel type and class where the difference in mileage is >=50%

I have a very hard time believing this, especially with fuel economy and emission regulations

[SpicyLemonZest]

The 2026 Toyota Corolla GR has 22mpg combined, and the normal 2026 Corolla has 35mpg with gas or 50mpg with a hybrid powertrain.

It is true that fuel economy regulations make it much less practical to deliver gas guzzlers out of pure laziness. (As you may know, the Corolla GR is by far the most expensive of these options, because it's designed to achieve horsepower over mileage.)

[hermanzegerman]

That's true, but nobody buys a GR by accident because he doesn't know it will be less fuel efficient. Same with the AMG or BMW M-Series

[piperswe]

They're probably not wrong, if they're talking about hypermiling a Prius

[walrus01]

> Do people actually take claims like that from glorified salesmen seriously?

People who know the tech, no

Non-technical middle management types, yes. It produces revenue when done aggressively enough, google "solarwinds sales people" for many anecdotal examples of extreme persistence. Not that I agree with it.

[thebruce87m]

I save 75% on electricity vs diesel

[pvtmert]

AWS has been (blatantly) using Microsoft method of making their way in. Redis, Elasticsearch, whatnot, all follow the same procedure: 1. Here is a managed service. 2. Here is a fork of the managed service where we manage the server (you don't see) with 15% off in price/credits. Easier backups with clicks etc. 3. We are dropping support of managed-X, move to our fork. 4. Due to the market conditions, our forked service is now 50% more expensive. 5. Ah also, you cannot export/download your backups because they are in proprietary format. 6. Locked-in.