So, they essentially saved the cost of one good engineer. Question is, are they spending 1 man-year of effort to maintain this setup themselves? If not, they made the right choice. Otherwise, it’s not as clear cut.
This fiction remains that AWS requires no specialist expertise.
And your own computers require expertise so expensive and frightening that no sane company would host their own computers.
How Amazon created this alternate reality should be studied in business schools for the next 50 years. Amazon made the IT industry doubt its own technical capabilities so much that the entire industry essential gave up on the idea that it can run computer systems, and instead bought into the fabulously complex and expensive and technically challenging cloud systems, whilst still believing they were doing the simplest and cheapest thing.
Amazon didn't create it. I was there for the mass cloud migrates of the last 15 years. It isn't that AWS requires no specialist expertise, it's that it's a certain kind of expertise that's easier to plan for and manage. Managing physical premises, hardware upgrade costs, etc are all skills your typical devops jockey doesn't need anymore. Unless you're fine with hosting your company's servers under your desk, it's the hidden costs of metal that makes businesses move to cloud.
Fortunately there are companies like Deft, OVH, Hetzner, Equinix, etc that handle all of that for you for a flat fee and while achieving economies of scale.
Colocation is rarely worth it unless you have non-standard requirements. If you just need a general-purpose machine, any of the aforementioned providers will sort you out just fine.
This is a strawman that keeps getting brought up, but nobody's claiming that. The difference remains though and the scale depends on what exactly do you consider as an alternative. Renting a couple servers will cost you in availability/resilience and extra hardware management time. Renting a managed rack will cost you in the above and premium on management. Doing things yourself will cost you in extra contracts / power / network planning, remote hands and time to source your components.
Almost everything that the AWS specialist needs to know comes in after that and has some equivalent in bare metal world, so those costs don't disappear either.
In practice there are extra costs which may or may not make sense in each case. And there are companies that don't reassess their spending as well as they should. But there's no alternative realty really. (As in, the usually discussed complications of bare metal are not extremely overplayed)
>"This fiction remains that AWS requires no specialist expertise.
And your own computers require expertise so expensive and frightening that no sane company would host their own computers."
As someone that works somewhere that goes AWS first and is 100% cloud native, you'd have to give me a massive increase in salary to deal with hardware.
Been there, done that, don't care to return to that life.
It include an asterisk. Those salaries come with the reality of living in locales like the bay area or Seattle and the like generally, with all the exorbitant costs of living in those areas
A lot of companies (like Amazon) will gleefully slash your salary if you try to move somewhere cheaper, because why should we pay you more if you don't just need that money to fork over to a landlord every month?
There's also all the things Americans go without, like socialized healthcare. Even with their lauded insurance plans they still pay significantly more for worse health outcomes than any other country
Nah even with bay area costs Americans get paid much much more than elsewhere. I could easily double my salary by moving from the UK to San Francisco. House prices are maybe double too, but since they are only a part of your outgoings, overall you come out waaaay ahead.
Of course then I would have to send my kids to schools with metal detectors and school shooting drills... It's not all about the money.
The employer es basically subsidizing the mortgage, incentivizing workers to move to the most expensive location, which make these locations even more expensive.
Canada is all kinds of mixed up on this front. On paper healthcare is pretty much perfect but if you dig in a bit you find a whole raft of things that simply don't work. Canadians don't go bankrupt because of a medical mishap, but they're much more likely to die while waiting for something they need.
That's about senior-level compensation even among most companies in the Bay Area. Only the extreme outliers with good performance on the stock market can be said to be significantly higher in TC.
Edit: even then, TC is tied to how the stock market is doing, and not paid out by the company directly, so it only makes sense to compare with base wage plus benefits.
1-2 weeks vacation if lucky, no overtime pay, 7/24 on-call (spread through team), many startups do 10-12h/day (and amazon), minus healthcare co-pay, etc.
That (and the other replies, I don't want to spam up the joint replying to all) is a fair point
Just to mention, I hope I didn't come across as saying paid too much. I'm always astounded as to how much cash is thrown about over the pond is all. Go get that bag, hell yeah! :)
Even the "easy" services like that have at least _some_ barrier to entry. IAM alone is a pretty big beast and I doubt someone whose never used AWS would grasp it their very first time logging into the web interface - and every service uses it extensively.
And then there's the question of whether you're going to use Terraform, Ansible, CloudFormation, etc or click through the GUI to manage things.
My point is, nothing in AWS is 100% turnkey like a lot of folks pretend it is. Most of the time, it's leadership that thinks since AWS is "Cloud" that it's as simple as put in your credit card and you're done.
I worked at a startup, hosted on AWS, that was deployed before EC2 IAM roles were a thing. We had the same AWS access key credentials deployed on every machine. Whenever an employee left, we had to rotate them all.. Fun times.
Exactly. A more accurate figure would be the difference between the work hours spent maintaining bare metal minus the work hours spent maintaining AWS. Impossible to know without internals but at least a point in favor of bare metal
1 man-year effort is probably less than the effort of AWS, though. So a double win!
A bit in jest, but places I've worked where we've moved to the cloud ended up with more people managing k8s and building a platform and tooling, than when we had a simple inhouse scp upload to some servers.
Even if they do spend 1 person-year of effort in maintenance they still may have made the correct choice. Having a good engineer on staff may have additional side benefits as well especially if they could manage to hire locally and that person's wages then contribute to the local economy. As you said though it's definitely not clear cut especially from a spectator's point of view.
The beauty of decisions like these is that it looks good on a bean counter's spreadsheet. The hours of human time they end up spending on its maintenance simply don't appear in that spreadsheet, but is gladly pushed onto everyone else's plates.
