I have not seen that claim until now. I always have been told the entire existence of AWS is because it’s way cheaper than self hosting and that makes sense to me
it completely depends on your use case. like, 100% of the time it depends on your use case. AWS can be cheaper, but it can also be orders of magnitude more expensive. That’s how AWS makes so much fucking money. Because once it’s orders of magnitude more expensive it’s very hard to move off of it. I ran a software stack at my last company completely on AWS Lambda. It was cheaper than if we hosted it ourselves, but not because the infrastructure was cheaper. No, it was more expensive, but because we had to do less maintenance and upkeep. Deploys were easier, rollbacks were easier, etc. If we didn’t care about maintenance, we weren’t deploying numerous times a day, and if our services were used 24/7 rather than only in the middle of the work day, then it would have been much cheaper to host it ourselves on a box in an office.
In SOME cases, it is cheaper than on prem.
If you need a lot of compute power occasionally, it can be cheaper.
If you actually scale up and down according to the load (which a lot of companies do not do), it might be cheaper.
But a large amount of companies don’t fall in those cases or don’t do it efficiently.
Some spend in a year the same amount they would have paid for on prem servers they would have kept 5 years or more.
Cloud providers offer other things like multi regional redundancy, which can be hard to achieve for smaller businesses.
It’s never been cheaper. It’s so much easier to scale. It’s never been cheaper. Well, maybe at a very low usage rate. But, at scale, it’s never been cheaper.
Buying server hardware is a lot more difficult and with more lead time than just buying a computer. Plus you then have to build your server infrastructure out in a data center. It takes a lot of time, and specific logistical skills. AWS is far easier to scale your services then doing it yourself, especially if you have extremely high peaks that you have to serve.
If AWS was cheaper then hosting, they wouldn’t make money.
The upfront cost of entering the market getting higher and higher as an industry matures is one of the major reasons why we have incomplete competition and monopolies. If as a scrappy underdog you “just” need to build a network of serverfarms and hire the people to design, manage and run all that so you can just even start to dream about competing with the goliaths that basically have all that built and more then in practice you are not entering that market. That upfront cost is the issue, not the cost of running it in the long run.
It’s not even some malicious plot, it’s just the cost of doing business in a maturing market gets higher as technology advances. All these cloud providers know this upfront cost issue. White it’s easier to start with AWS they will try to keep everybody locked in so they can milk every cent out of their techofeudal peasants living in their fiefdom if they ever make it. If anybody wants to get out they need to cough up the cash to build all that infrastructure while still paying for Amazon to keep them going.
I have not seen that claim until now. I always have been told the entire existence of AWS is because it’s way cheaper than self hosting and that makes sense to me
it completely depends on your use case. like, 100% of the time it depends on your use case. AWS can be cheaper, but it can also be orders of magnitude more expensive. That’s how AWS makes so much fucking money. Because once it’s orders of magnitude more expensive it’s very hard to move off of it. I ran a software stack at my last company completely on AWS Lambda. It was cheaper than if we hosted it ourselves, but not because the infrastructure was cheaper. No, it was more expensive, but because we had to do less maintenance and upkeep. Deploys were easier, rollbacks were easier, etc. If we didn’t care about maintenance, we weren’t deploying numerous times a day, and if our services were used 24/7 rather than only in the middle of the work day, then it would have been much cheaper to host it ourselves on a box in an office.
In SOME cases, it is cheaper than on prem. If you need a lot of compute power occasionally, it can be cheaper. If you actually scale up and down according to the load (which a lot of companies do not do), it might be cheaper. But a large amount of companies don’t fall in those cases or don’t do it efficiently. Some spend in a year the same amount they would have paid for on prem servers they would have kept 5 years or more.
Cloud providers offer other things like multi regional redundancy, which can be hard to achieve for smaller businesses.
Thank you for the thoughtful response and not just downvoting like most others!
It’s never been cheaper. It’s so much easier to scale. It’s never been cheaper. Well, maybe at a very low usage rate. But, at scale, it’s never been cheaper.
Buying server hardware is a lot more difficult and with more lead time than just buying a computer. Plus you then have to build your server infrastructure out in a data center. It takes a lot of time, and specific logistical skills. AWS is far easier to scale your services then doing it yourself, especially if you have extremely high peaks that you have to serve.
If AWS was cheaper then hosting, they wouldn’t make money.
The upfront cost of entering the market getting higher and higher as an industry matures is one of the major reasons why we have incomplete competition and monopolies. If as a scrappy underdog you “just” need to build a network of serverfarms and hire the people to design, manage and run all that so you can just even start to dream about competing with the goliaths that basically have all that built and more then in practice you are not entering that market. That upfront cost is the issue, not the cost of running it in the long run.
It’s not even some malicious plot, it’s just the cost of doing business in a maturing market gets higher as technology advances. All these cloud providers know this upfront cost issue. White it’s easier to start with AWS they will try to keep everybody locked in so they can milk every cent out of their techofeudal peasants living in their fiefdom if they ever make it. If anybody wants to get out they need to cough up the cash to build all that infrastructure while still paying for Amazon to keep them going.