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by tough 2 hours ago
I run the CI infra for our company, and our bare metal costs (sans my salary baked in), are one order of magnitude less than if using any other CI saas provider like github or others.

Like literally 10x times more expensive to do so, to run CI jobs...

I dont want to imagine the margin AWS has like generally, cause it can easily be a 90% too

2 comments

Their aggregate margin is typically around 30%-40% based on Amazon financials, but that reflects a lot of cost they have as a provider that you as a user wouldn't, e.g. cost of sales and the complexities of managing a multi-tenanted setup, as well as a number of huge customers that clearly are not paying list prices -anyone who is paying six figures or more at AWS and paying the publicly listed prices are overpaying (they can and do negotiate).

The margin on the list prices are clearly far higher.

Right? It's actually crazy how much they don't cost. Are you using it more than 10%? If so, you're saving money.

I assume you're using your owned server and not a provider like Hetzner? So you did have a substantial delivery time. Although in my city is a recycled that resells used servers, and I could show up there with a truck and get a server within hours if I'm not too picky. Or use some random desktop or laptop off the pile, short-term.

No we're on hetzner/ovh boxes, so delivery time really isnt an issue.

Right now the biggest issue is the vibe coded CI program is not really meant to be a distributed multi-node thing yet, so we're on the biggest machines (there's some newer bigger stuff we could migrate too) and the only issue is on peak hours queue can get a bit slow.. but that was also some other bugs etc making not ideal.

Tbh it works pretty well, we just need now to scale it to more than one node etc (which is not to say that is easy, but still, x10 headroom to work with)