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kevin_nisbetHNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

I worked for a startup doing internet of things, the consumer would buy a device and get lifetime …

… I worked for a startup doing internet of things, the consumer would buy a device and get lifetime service baked in. And that company was a step further, just renting space in a colo was incredibly cost efficient, which supported the sales model and competitive landscape of that product. But it was also very costly to attention, one of the most valuable resources. But it can also get costly in non-intuitive ways, an example that comes to mind is we started to get interviews where a generation of candidates no longer had experience with metal, it was a foreign world to them. With more experience, I find it's really the costs that get severely underestimated, both for and against the suggestion.

Original discussionDutch central bank dithces AWS and chooses Lidl for European Cloud148 source comments · at import
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retiredHN

Years ago I was making the case that instead of digging ourselves into the Amazon eco-system with S3 storage, EC2 instances, DynamoDB and various other Amazon specific cloud products... we should just host virtual machines and have everything in there using open source products. People looked at me like they saw water burning but that would have made the dependency on the US a lot easier to sever. Just move the VM's.

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ghaffHN

Especially in larger organizations, it's easy to lose track of all the distributed soft costs that DIY can bring (and all the bus factors that may be involved). There are lots of people that kinda want to get paid and get benefits and which require some level of management structure. At some point, you have people (on here and elsewhere) questioning what all these people in an organization do. PART of the answer is that they're doing internal work that could have been outsourced in various ways.

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port11HN

I’ve struggled with convincing colleagues to host on something other than AWS. I’m not sure they understand the costs and aren’t simply doubling-down on the evil they already know. In fact, I had no idea our static website at a scale-up in 2019 was costing us 90€/month; it came up when we were told to cut costs. Developers don’t always have a say in these things. Heck, I then went and got a series of certifications in GCP. Even then, I’m not sure I’d understand the full complexity and pricing options of GCP. Smaller clouds and simple VPS solutions really are the overlooked option.

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BrandoElFollitoHN

> fully understood Unfortunately this is neither the case for very large, or very small companies. Very large companies may have some experience, but it is usually legacy. Or buried under processes and politics. Small companies will not have the experience to make the analysis

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