I'll give you an alternative scenario, which IME is more realistic.
I'm a software developer, and I've worked at several companies, big and small and in-between, with poor to abysmal IT/operations. I've introduced and/or advocated cloud at all of them.
The idea that it's "more expensive" is nonsense in these situations. Calculate the cost of the IT/operations incompetence, and the cost of the slowness of getting anything done, and cloud is cheap.
Extremely cheap.
Not only that, it can increase shipping velocity, and enable all kinds of important capabilities that the business otherwise just wouldn't have, or would struggle to implement.
Much of the "cloud so expensive" crowd are just engineers too narrowly focused on a small part of the picture, or in denial about their ability to compete with the competence of cloud providers.
> Much of the "cloud so expensive" crowd are just engineers too narrowly focused on a small part of the picture, or in denial about their ability to compete with the competence of cloud providers
This has been my experience as well. There are legitimate points of criticism but every time I’ve seen someone try to make that argument it’s been comparing significantly different levels of service (e.g. a storage comparison equating S3 with tape) or leaving out entire categories of cost like the time someone tried to say their bare metal costs for a two server database cluster was comparable to RDS despite not even having things like power or backups.
That leaves out staffing, backups, development and testing of a multi-location failover mechanism as robust as the RDS one, and a bunch of security compliance work if that’s relevant.
It’s totally possible to beat AWS and volume is the way to do it–your admin’s salary doesn’t scale be linearly with storage–but every time I’ve tried to account for all of the costs it’s been close enough that it’s made sense to put people on things which can’t be outsourced.
If this database is a large portion of the infrastructure required then the fixed-ish costs don't scale so well, but a smaller cloud/hosting company should be considered.
But I have over 60 servers. Using the pricing calculator for the two AWS SaaS services that closely align with our primary service (40+ of those servers), we'd face a cost of over $1.2M/year if reserved for 3 years and paid upfront — that's for the service alone, I haven't added any bandwidth costs, or getting the data into those systems, and I've picked the minimum values for storage and throughput as I don't know what these should be. (Probably not the minimum.)
Add the remaining compute (~20 decent servers), a petabyte-scale storage pool, and all the rest, and the bill would likely exceed our entire IT budget including hardware, hosting, cloud services we do use, and all the salaries.
My rough estimate is our infrastructure costs would increase 8-10 times using AWS, our staff costs wouldn't reduce, and the risk to the budget would increase with variable usage.
This is tax money being spent, so I am asked every few years to justify why we aren't using cloud. (That's why I'm putting this much effort into a HN reply, the question was asked again recently.)
I know someone working in another country on essentially the same system for that country. They went all-in on AWS and pay every 1-2 months what we spend in a year, but have a fraction of our population/data.
Fron what I've seen this can work as a stopgap until IT get their hooks into the cloud system in which case you circle back to paying to costs of incompetence and the costs of the cloud (sometimes stacking on top of each other).
There's still a benefit in terms of infrastructure reliability. Recovery times are faster, backups more reliable, etc. Basically, vendor managed is better than customer managed in most situations, assuming a competent vendor.
Also, if the cloud systems are architected properly before IT gets hold of them, then they tend to retain their good properties for a long time, especially if others are paying attention to e.g. gitops pull requests.
My current company ended up replacing its (small) operations team in order to get people with cloud expertise. We hired the new team for the skills we needed. It's worked out well.
I'll give you an alternative scenario, which IME is more realistic.
I'm a software developer, and I've worked at several companies, big and small and in-between, with poor to abysmal IT/operations. I've introduced and/or advocated cloud at all of them.
The idea that it's "more expensive" is nonsense in these situations. Calculate the cost of the IT/operations incompetence, and the cost of the slowness of getting anything done, and cloud is cheap.
Extremely cheap.
Not only that, it can increase shipping velocity, and enable all kinds of important capabilities that the business otherwise just wouldn't have, or would struggle to implement.
Much of the "cloud so expensive" crowd are just engineers too narrowly focused on a small part of the picture, or in denial about their ability to compete with the competence of cloud providers.