[beachstartup]

most of the public cloud cheer-leading is just people rationalizing to themselves what an awesome decision they made deploying on aws onto a billion tiny instances or whatever. and for lots of folks, it probably is pretty awesome.

however, i've seen very, very few people compare actual before/after $ figures on hn. when it comes time to show your cards everyone gets cold feet, either because they 1. don't have any idea because they aren't the ones paying for it or 2. don't have a baseline for comparison and are just paying whatever amazon asks or 3. it ended up costing 2-4x as much on amazon

when your bill is $5k/month 2-4x isn't that big of a deal. when it's $100k+ a month, it becomes a really big deal.