AWS Cost vs Self-Hosting

Sounds like they did the right thing for their business model.I think as AWS grows and changes the curve of the target audience is changing too. The value proposition is "You can get Cloud service without having a dedicated Cloud team," but there are caveats:- AWS is complicated enough that you will still need a team to integrate against it. The abstractions are not free and the ones that are leaky will bite you without dedicated systems engineers to specialize in making it work

people use aws despite it being 2x-10x the cost of self hosting. cost isnt everything.

AWS is always more expensive than owned hardware + good team -- it's after all what they generate their profits from. However, it's also probable that they were using the cloud wrong. Their software (afaik) is a typical 3-tier application coded on Ruby on Rails, which probably implies that they used just EC2s, with probably an orchestrator on top.Also, if they didn't need any new staff after moving to their own server rooms, this implies that either their staff was having lots

I think you're totally right. There's a product manager somewhere in AWS whose using the comparison "total cost and productivity of managing own infrastructure" vs AWS. That means cost of people building/managing servers, but also goes much higher up the stack into the other services they provide from backup, content distribution, etc. In fact, Amazon is commoditising simple IaaS because that comparison would be AWS vs "Buying my own server and plugging it at the da

ECS can get up there if you're backing with large ec2 instances or somethingeither way my biggest problem with services like AWS isn't really cost but that you end up using all of their SDKs and services out of convenicance and it becomes hard to track down or move away from.. it spiders out of control so fast that sometimes its better to spend an extra few weeks doing things the harder way that's not always an issue though espcially for startups

"AWS is overpriced service for people that do not have time or resources to do things on their own and pay massive prices for that."Isn't that the point of AWS?The time / resources cost to build (monitor and maintain..) your own infrastructure isn't zero.Did these companies have spare teams lying around the place, such that no new hires were needed to make the transition? If not, then it's not so much of a saving at the current cost of dev / ops person

AWS can be expensive, but it comes down to engineering and needs.I'd argue it's most expensive for small (10-50 person... ish) businesses -- to small to hire a LOT of overhead staff, but not small enough that you're still in POC/MVP stage.A lot of ideas can be tested in AWS essentially free. However, if you pick the wrong tools or don't anticipate future bills, you can end up with additional costs and need to re-engineer slightly.That said, it works best with sc

We are heavily invested in AWS. AWS is not cheaper, but it doesn't mean it's prohibitively expensive when you consider everything it offers. What people tend to ignore are the other things it offers. For example, the parent talks about data transfer costs, but that's just one aspect of cost.The real big cost in any organization is head count. And while a load balancer is not difficult to setup and maintain the first time, managing it becomes time consuming in a large enough

People pay for convenience. AWS is just convenient. Managing your own servers requires more work. It is far far far cheaper in terms of server costs. You do have to:- Know how to maintain a server by yourself- Hire someone who canAWS removes part of that and thus people pay for it. An average (good enough) sys admin costs the same as a programmer.

Hi, startup here, with a colo and an AWS bill. The amount of time spent per a month on tasks that "AWS Handles" is almost 0 month to month. Maybe 4 trips a year into the DC. Calculating our AWS bill for fully replacing the colo is well over 4x using small 4-8gb instances. Our virtualization hosts(plural) have 64gb ram+ and 24 cores. That allows me not to focus on any scale issue since I can just shove everything into ram for no extra cost. I can buy more DDR3 ram for the servers for le