> I remember saying to my cofounder why does anyone use AWS, you can do this on your own way cheaper.
I agree with everything you say - I'm convinced that a huge part of the cloud's financial success is due to how it allows CTOs/CIOs to indulge their fantasies about having a mega-scalable app - even if their workloads are very regular and predictable. Along the lines of buying an expensive sports car but never driving it fast, you're just paying for the kudos it brings you in the eyes of other people.
Having said that, we are happily using the cloud for our small app because it makes no sense to build out our own infrastructure for a single VPS and database.
> I agree with everything you say - I'm convinced that a huge part of the cloud's financial success is due to how it allows CTOs/CIOs to indulge their fantasies about having a mega-scalable app - even if their workloads are very regular and predictable.
It's a sane choice given incentives, too. Cloud bullshit features prominently on an awful lot of technical job postings these days.
But yeah I've definitely seen some heavy, expensive cloud setups that could have run on a toaster. Smaller-scale B2B stuff seems especially prone to this—like, what's your max reasonable traffic? If you took off like crazy? What's the size of your market? Come on. Throw in really half-assed and inconsistent use of automation tools and lots of relying on shitty cloud web dashboards and hope, and often the toaster (or a couple low-end co-located servers, more seriously) would be easier and safer to manage, too.
From a developer perspective, I prefer to work with cloud providers because I can do more with fewer developers because I'm not dealing with sysadmins too. I can throw up a EMR cluster with minimal effort and get a working product out the door quickly.
These things don't matter for large, established companies because they already have DevOps, SysAdmin, and Development teams. But for smaller dev shops, it absolutely makes a difference when you can generate a good bit more efficiency from your development staff.
That may be the case for a startup. But
in the average corporate IT environment the on-prem server infrastructure and procedural/political jungle is so terrible that you just have to get away from it. Before "cloud" became fashionable it was politically hard or impossible to host your project somewhere outside the bad corporate infrastructure, but now there's a way to present the choice in a palatable way.
I agree with everything you say - I'm convinced that a huge part of the cloud's financial success is due to how it allows CTOs/CIOs to indulge their fantasies about having a mega-scalable app - even if their workloads are very regular and predictable. Along the lines of buying an expensive sports car but never driving it fast, you're just paying for the kudos it brings you in the eyes of other people.
Having said that, we are happily using the cloud for our small app because it makes no sense to build out our own infrastructure for a single VPS and database.