As more and more companies are moving to the cloud, I'm assuming that a lot of smart people have done the math and have decided Cloud is more efficient.
I’m a sysadmin, I know hardware. I think it’s a complete myth that hardware is hard: especially compared with the irreducible complexity that is AWS.
But: I find myself coming back to the cloud.
Why? It costs more and you have less control. Scale up is not as important as it seems and the 10x cost difference would mean scale is not a factor either.
But, in my experience, not dealing with an IT department is the main reason.
Hardware lead times can be high, sure, but there is nothing more frustrating than depending on someone to do their job and they do it bad.
The “efficiency of scale” is almost entirely in the tooling, certainly not the cost, when it comes to cloud.
I keep coming back because even though compute is not hard, nor networking for that matter: distributed storage is still hard.
I have three on-premise servers now and dealing with the IT team is.. well, let’s just say I prefer to deal with the cloud vendor.
The number of people hired to manage the cloud tends to be the same number as hired to deal with on-prem.
I've been in a company with many hundreds of physical machines to manage and a team of 4, and I've been in a company with infrastructure that handles a similar use-case on cloud in a team of 5.. So I don't buy the headcount argument honestly.
After all, most companies using the "cloud" still have on-staff IT anyway, since non-technical people still cannot manage AWS or any other cloud provider on their own.
Cash flow is another thing - lay out big money for redundant on-site servers and supporting hardware today, or pay as you go and use the cloud. Even if the cloud is ultimately more expensive, it's easier for C-suite folks to plan for a small monthly expense vs. huge up front expenses and then dealing with failures and upgrades, etc.
You still get ridiculous cost savings over cloud, and none of the long lead times you mention when buying your own hardware.
Read also: https://a16z.com/2021/05/27/cost-of-cloud-paradox-market-cap...
And the comment about "the bills go through the roof" aren't 100% true either. AWS isn't sitting around trying con you into spending all your money. If they were they wouldn't have: 1. Reduced the price of AWS Lambda multiple times since launched 2. Switched from billing for AWS Lambda in 100ms increments to per ms increments, saving everyone using a lot of money. 3. Developing an alternative v2 solution to API Gateway that is faster, easier to use and cheaper per request than API Gateway v1 was. 4. Constantly bringing prices down for all services such as S3, SNS, SQS, etc.
And if you happen to be a high volume user, one chat to your account representative and you get very generous volume discounts across the board, saving you even more.
I’m sure it was a good decision to save costs on their part though.
