Re:It's time to reconsider going on-prem
by kuschku on Thursday October 13, 2016 @02:43AM
(#12698962)
Actually, you can, because AWS still has insanely high profit margins.
Even going from EC2 to classical dedicated servers in cloud (IVH, Hetzner, etc) will get you about an order of magnitude cost reduction.
Re:It's time to reconsider going on-prem
by ZenoArrow on Thursday October 13, 2016 @03:18AM
(#12699064)
Exactly. There's a reason multiple large IT companies have invested heavily in cloud services, and it's not so they can be in a market with hard to obtain profits.
In terms of why cloud services are becoming popular for their users, it makes things cheaper in the short term, and is a easier sell to management than on-premises resources. It's also useful for putting together solutions when you work in a company with overly restrictive local computing resources. However if you're looking to save money in the medium to long term, and you can find people you trust with server administration, then you're better off with on-premises (perhaps only keeping a cloud-hosted load balancer if you wanted to guard against unexpected spikes in network traffic).
> Economies of scale: some customers have the capacity and ability to acquire and operate compute resources at much cheaper rates than cloud providers offer.
AWS is probably spending a billion dollars per year or more on hardware... they get special things that are not available to the public like chips and hard drives. You really can't compete with that.