> They aren't crazy or stupid, and as AWS is the world's leading cloud provider then it's highly doubtful that the decision is irrational and motivated by ignorance.
Part of the problem is that a huge proportion of the people I come across who chose AWS used this exact argument. Part of the problem with that argument is that none of the big guys are paying the list prices (unless they're not doing their jobs; I've seen the kind of discounts available once you get into even the few hundred k/month range and tell your account manager you're considering moving), and a lot of them also used the same line of thinking.
It pulls in a lot of people who pick AWS for all the wrong reasons.
> AWS might overcharge a lot, but truth of the matter is that for any sizeable corporation it's irrelevant if they spend 200€ or 400€ on their cloud infrastructure.
The ones I used to deal with used to be more like a 3x-10x cost difference on bills in the 10k-100k/month range. I agree with you that if the difference is ~200/month, then who cares. But a lot of much bigger companies burn money this way. Often because they started off with a 200/month difference, and then never made it a point to re-evaluate as their costs grew.
The difference isn't always that bad, but especially bandwidth hungry services are ridiculously expensive on AWS (to the point where if people really badly want to stay on AWS and spend a lot on bandwidth, a quick and dirty fix is to rent servers to use as caches in front of their AWS setup)
I'm not saying people shouldn't use AWS. But as you point out, the right usecase for AWS is when you don't mind the cost, and pick it for convenience, and there's the warm fuzzy feeling of knowing you can hire people "off the street" who knows how AWS works.
AWS is the luxury option. Sometimes you want the luxury option.
But it worries me how many startups build in ways that end up locking them into a provider that for some of them multiplies their per user cost by anything from 2x to 10x. When I evaluate startup pitches today, I often ask whether or not they have thought this through. It doesn't matter so much that they're on AWS - that might well be a fine choice. What matters is whether it was a conscious decision, and they've done at least a superficial attempt at modelling the costs both for AWS and some alternatives, rather than just picked it by default.
For any start-up that is expecting to work with enterprise customers there is no choice and has been this way for at least 3 years now but to support AWS. This doesn't mean you must use AWS (with Azure close second and GCP irrelevant essentially for most large non-tech customers) for your entire footprint, but you will need to have POP in most regions that the F500 works with strategically. Any enterprise tech founder that utters the word cloud should know this as table stakes to compete for the foreseeable future.
That absolutely makes sense. But you can achieve that by either being able to deploy the client specific bits to AWS for clients that absolutely insist, or by simply deploying proxies and picking and choosing on a per service basis whether or not it makes sense to deploy it to AWS or proxy it to your own infra.
Sure, but there's a fun catch with this strategy. I'm familiar with some companies that refuse to work with vendors that use AWS for production hosting of their footprint because it would be funding their competitor. There's no such thing as a company that contractually requires all of production in AWS though, in contrast, not even AWS.
wrt to aws, there's also the option of building out with serverless tech, which is a dramatic cost reduction (not paying for idle) and ideally scaled for usage to business model/revenue. cloud portability suffers but I've found for an ha setup, its a dramatic cost savings (10x) while getting traction for a service. I've seen that transformation bear out in many enterprise companies. As an example I built out https://awsapichanges.info and run it for less then a dollar month with fargate spot, s3, etc. Just saying ymmv depending on how you want to build/design your app's use of infra resources.
It really isn't a dramatic cost reduction for most people, as most people simply don't have sufficiently large difference between base load and peak. I love the concept of serverless, but I'm not seeing it as a cost savings measure for the most part, but as a simplification of architecture.
Part of the problem is that a huge proportion of the people I come across who chose AWS used this exact argument. Part of the problem with that argument is that none of the big guys are paying the list prices (unless they're not doing their jobs; I've seen the kind of discounts available once you get into even the few hundred k/month range and tell your account manager you're considering moving), and a lot of them also used the same line of thinking.
It pulls in a lot of people who pick AWS for all the wrong reasons.
> AWS might overcharge a lot, but truth of the matter is that for any sizeable corporation it's irrelevant if they spend 200€ or 400€ on their cloud infrastructure.
The ones I used to deal with used to be more like a 3x-10x cost difference on bills in the 10k-100k/month range. I agree with you that if the difference is ~200/month, then who cares. But a lot of much bigger companies burn money this way. Often because they started off with a 200/month difference, and then never made it a point to re-evaluate as their costs grew.
The difference isn't always that bad, but especially bandwidth hungry services are ridiculously expensive on AWS (to the point where if people really badly want to stay on AWS and spend a lot on bandwidth, a quick and dirty fix is to rent servers to use as caches in front of their AWS setup)
I'm not saying people shouldn't use AWS. But as you point out, the right usecase for AWS is when you don't mind the cost, and pick it for convenience, and there's the warm fuzzy feeling of knowing you can hire people "off the street" who knows how AWS works.
AWS is the luxury option. Sometimes you want the luxury option.
But it worries me how many startups build in ways that end up locking them into a provider that for some of them multiplies their per user cost by anything from 2x to 10x. When I evaluate startup pitches today, I often ask whether or not they have thought this through. It doesn't matter so much that they're on AWS - that might well be a fine choice. What matters is whether it was a conscious decision, and they've done at least a superficial attempt at modelling the costs both for AWS and some alternatives, rather than just picked it by default.