AWS is NOT cheap

I mean AWS optimization is a valid consultancy/self employment career; it's like tech debt in coding, you make it work first, prove that it works, get value from it, and only then look into optimizing. Would these clients have been able to make the upfront investment to set up their own racks and hire / train the relevant staff? That's the sales pitch for AWS and other cloud providers, you can get started a lot faster, make money, only then look into optimizing. Running your own servers is easy to underestimate. Running it with the reliability, backup and fallbacks that cloud providers offer is also easily overlooked. How much does it cost to set up a multi region cluster yourself? That said, there are some real life examples of companies that moved away from AWS in favor of their own servers, like Dropbox which bootstrapped on AWS, then built their own eight years later ( https://techcr…

> AWS is NOT cheap. I've realised that cloud costs are a "wave". (App is app/service/business) - cheap to run as a small app - costly to run as a bigger app, cheaper to self-host - cheaper than running all infra for a much bigger app - extremely costly compared to running all infra for a much-much bigger app - probably on par with running your own infra (but then you're getting into tens/hundreds of millions of customers)

You can sit here calling “profit” pissing money away until you’re on the receiving end of it. Then you’ll be going on about the value you’re providing. Stop being dramatic.

> Everything has cost and value and managing that is going to become an engineering task in the near future. FYI: I have known people 8 years ago who already made money by optimizing people's AWS bills. "AWS expert", "AWS consultant" etc. are valid contractor titles.

> 23 billon that AWS users pissed away. While I agree that running your own hardware can be _seriously_ cheaper, this is like saying that renting is a waste of money and everyone should purchase a home. Capacity planning isn't easy for a lot of small companies. Neither is the engineering time to set up, manage, and troubleshoot the hardware. At a certain scale, these are no brainers to take into your own hands, but for a 15 person engineering team that's completely focused on the product, it would be pretty expensive in human cost to set up and manage your own hardware. Sometimes, it can be set-and-forget, but rarely will it be as set-and-forget as a cloud provider. Is it more expensive overall? Yes. Is it "pissed away" money? In some cases, maybe. In many, no. The ease of running and reduced upfront capex is absolutely valuable.

How much would be pissed away on duplicating DBMS administration work? Are we that far removed from reality to forget that one small team of DB admins can handle literally thousands of instances? We use AWS because collectively paying AWS 23billion is stupendously cheaper than 1m users AWS having a a whole infrastructure team.

> 23 billon that AWS users pissed away. How do you know it would have cost them less to hire their own teams for self-hosting?