Some startups (A) I work with have basically no OPS costs beyond setup, integrating Docker deployements and getting automatic backup working. Most simple technology just works and devs easily can do operations. The largest pain point still is VPN. Machines today are very very fast and load of many startups is very low. This are mostly simple marketplace startups etc. without any rocket science aka "web ui frontend to database". They often have <10 servers and are still over provisioned mostly due to HA requirements.

Some startups (B) I work with have high OPS costs due to demanding technology needs for throughput, load peaks, amount of data with innovative technology at their core, aka "rocket science".

I have not seen any correlation between AWS usage and A/B types.

From my experience with startups the only way to successfully use AWS is deep integration and using lots of services. If you use AWS and do everything on your own people are doing it wrong.

I don't mean this case to be universal, in particular, I think cloud services force applications to have a particularly good/modular design (which is a cost in itself) - where, with metal, as you wrote, you can relatively cheaply overprovision.

I think the analysis you're making overlooks some important characteristics of the infrastructure engineering aspect.

Some typical network/infrastructure elements, in particular firewalling, load balancing, and network management don't necessarily belong to the "rocket science" type of application; they are easy to overlook in "type A" services, ending with a "kind-of-HA-but-not-really" infrastructure, which is ok, but it makes the comparison cloud <> metal not really meaningful, as in the cloud, those features are baked in ("almost" for free).

I'm very skeptical for example, that the 5x figure includes hardware for the above network equipment and management.

To summarize, it's perfectly fine not to have an "advanced" infrastructure but it must be highlighted that such conditions make a direct comparison incorrect.

From what did you transition to what? 20% sounds like a very small markup, from my experience and from other people experiences documented on the web it's much much larger (at 10x?) than your experience.

So I would be rather interested in more details as many people ask me about Amazon transitioning, and 20% markup would be killer.

"Some typical network/infrastructure elements, in particular firewalling, load balancing, and network management don't necessarily belong to the "rocket science" type of application;"

I surely do not know your demands, but firewalling, load balanicng etc. looks rather easy to me today for everyone except Google, Amazon, LinkedIn, AirBnB and 99% of startups are not one of these.

"I'm very skeptical for example, that the 5x figure includes hardware for the above network equipment and management."

Not sure what you are using, the hardware would be around $40 per month for that kind of network architecture (FW,HAProxy,Nginx,...).

In my last job we had large NetScalers which where much more powerful then HAProxy/Nginx on a rented server, and I assume AWS is as powerful, but for most of my clients this would be huge overkill.

The LBs you're talking about are software. I was referring to hardware solutions; a soft load balancer is still a good solution, but brings back to the problem I've made before - unit granularity.

Do you refer to two (two is the minimum required for HA purposes) dedicated load balancing machines, or mixed services?

In the former case, metal is not very convenient, as the minimal unit even for a pure LB machine, is still expensive.

In the latter case, it's hard to say, buy I think there is plenty of middle ground between a small startup and Amazon, where the cloud granularity is helpful and cost-effective (I'm not implying that it's generally cheaper than metal, though).

Our base environment (we have several) has 4 servers, 2 of whom are used for the app servers and load balancers, and 2 for data stores and queue processors.

Each server is the typical (as someone in this thread named) "8k" server (a bit more costly, actually). Generally speaking, the servers are significantly overprovisioned.

There are a couple of factors that made the conversion to AWS cheap (~20+).

The first is that the base unit of a metal server is very large (1 server). Although it's cheap to scale vertically, scaling horizontally, for HA purposes, is expensive, because it costs at least 2 units.

For example, the total power of our app servers is overprovisioned in the 20x range (CPU and memory are cheap, right?). Even with minimal speccing, a metal server still costs around 3/4k, you need 2, that's 6/8k.

In AWS, we can work with very small units. So maybe we end up paying the same amount, but we don't need that excessive power, and, crucial, we have networking for free (or almost).

The second factor is networking and hosting costs, which are not trivial. We rent managed firewalls and load balancers, which in AWS are for free or almost.

Also, it's important to spread the servers cost over the time - any metal server won't last forever. If you buy one for 9.6k, it's 100$ a month for 8 years. When it breaks, HA goes temporarily out of the window until it gets fixed (or you buy a new one, or you move services around).

The big pain point of AWS [for us] is RDS, which is madly expensive. It accounts for something like 50% of our AWS costs.

A very gross estimation of the monthly costs of each metal server could be:

- 80$: server - 80$: hosting - 80$: managed networking

For 4 servers, that's almost 1000$. Adding 20%, with a budget of 1200$, with AWS, we have a less powerful but also correspondingly less wasteful infrastructure, with lots of baked-in functionality (including, more flexible HA).

E.g. I had a setup that spanned on-demand instances, rented managed servers, racks in two separate colos and racks on premises. We expanded resources whenever it was cost effective at the time. Generally the colos won out, with on-demand instances handling traffic spikes, and managed servers primarily used for locations we did not have staff.

When your infrastructure is designed so that adding a new one of any of those is just a matter of assigning IP space to the new satellite network and deploy the first instances - whatever they're physically on - your utilisation of all the resources can be far higher.

E.g. in this setup we have instances where we move containers seamlessly between the UK, New Zealand and Germany currently depending on load, available resources, and which instances need low latency (Germany vs. UK makes a roughly 8ms latency difference despite going over an encrypted VPN connection, so we've even had times where client traffic hits load-balancers in the UK while the web servers were temporarily in Germany because it happened to be cheaper to expand there for a while (and contrary to with AWS, our bandwidth costs in both locations are trivial).

If you're comparing to "lets throw a bunch of servers somewhere", then, yes, AWS probably won't be that much more expensive, and presumably that is a big part of why so many people gets caught out by AWS costs once they start scaling up.

Rearchitecting may be necessary anyway, but doing this kind of work involves hiring and training better senior devs and retaining them for a couple of years at least. That's not cheap. It's A lot more expensive than those OPS guys you laid off.

I think what both of these scenarios share is that they're not about saving money. They're about empire building for the Dev manager.

Also, an 8k server is a big unit. Cloud services are much more granular. This is a problem of bare metal - it's easy to overprovision because the base unit is large, and one ends up being happy of having an "overprovisioned" system, when in reality it's money down the drain.

Also, you don't count the management of the 8k server. It may (but not necessarily) be at a click distance; if it is, the management hardware (eg. one from a very famous servers producer) may have a poor software.

There are reasons why, in some cases (of course, not in all or not in many), cloud may be more advantageous than an "8k" bare metal server.

All in all, I think without numbers, talking about metal vs. cloud in abstract, generic terms, makes a poor argument.

My point was that it's peanuts compared to the labor costs it saves. I've worked quite a few places where a single $2-3k server would have saved every employee around an hour a day. In some cases several machines would have saved an hour each.

Every person you don't need gets you more than one person worth of increased productivity due to scaling limits, (see also Fred Brooks, IT and HR - more employees, more support staff).

(That doesn't happen when you're building from the jump for AWS or another cloud, though, unless you're messing up on a deeper level.)

I love it when customers pick AWS (though I usually advice not to, unless they have very specific needs), as my billable hours are way higher for those clients, though it is annoying having to deal with the inevitable "why is my AWS bill so big?" after I'd told them exactly why it'd be expensive in the first place. This is particularly true with bandwidth heavy setups, where AWS charges tens of times more per TB transferred than e.g. Hetzner.

Often I even end up getting paid to help them get off AWS again down the line when they realise how expensive it is.

Overall the idea that managed servers and even bare metal colocated servers take up so much more operations time is just not what I experience. Even if it did, if you're even moderate successful it'd need to save you a crazy amount of operational time per server to make up for the price differences in the hosting.

Further my experience is that you don't need to over-provision much exactly because setting up hybrid setups where you spin up AWS instances (or any other cloud) to handle spikes works well. The trick is to treat managed servers exactly as cloud instances, apart from at most the initial hardware provisioning (though many hosting companies provides APIs for this so you can abstract away that too), so that it doesn't matter where you provision.

As for services like RDS etc., they're a very mixed bag. When they work for you, great, though they're expensive, but very often I end up with clients having to move off them because they need some plugin or other that isn't available. Very few of my clients in the end stay on them for very long. Their biggest benefit is to defer the initial setup of a self-managed cluster.

That doesn't mean there are no cases where AWS is the right choice - for starters having it there for traffic spikes is great (though we usually end up needing it very rarely), and if you need large batch jobs or other environments you spin up/down frequently, it may be cost effective. But it's extremely rare I see cases where it's cost effective for base load.

The typical argument then is that big companies wouldn't have picked them if it wasn't. But big companies don't pay the prices mere mortals pay. I know concrete examples of large negotiated discounts for a couple of larger companies, and they are steep.

> and I'd have to spend more money and time on auditors

That might be true, but most companies are not in a position where they need their IT infrastructure audited. This might very well be a niche that makes it worth using AWS.

> And I've haven't even started to think about securing the resulting systems to the same level I get for minimal effort from a major public cloud.

My experience is that getting security right on the public clouds is harder than bare metal. If you take the effort to do it properly, the end results can be good. But a lot of that is simplified a lot in a colo'ed environment by simply physically separating resources into different network segments and the like.

For people with very complex requirements, you might even get better results, but I could never agree with "minimal effort" - it's very common to see people badly misconfiguring their IAM setup for example, because it was too hard for them to figure out how to open up just the specific things they needed to open.

> Their biggest benefit is to defer the initial setup of a self-managed cluster

And that, I think, is why (nearly) every startup, or indeed every new project, should begin on a public cloud. The capital waste of an incorrect server purchase can ruin a project and makes "fast failure" hard to stomach.

I don't move services away until an alternative is clearly both cheaper in 3yr NPV, and will not constrain future business opportunities. Except in cash cow operations where innovation has ceased, I rate the second criteria more important than the first and a compelling reason to stay on a public cloud.

As for the CDN, we absolutely agree. I noted elsewhere that even if you host on AWS, if you have any kind of volume of outbound bandwidth use, you should probably get a CDN elsewhere whether or not you think you need a CDN. A good caching CDN can for many people cut their AWS bill dramatically without making you move anything else off AWS.

If cost is your reason for looking at a CDN, or a big part of it, CloudFront will do very little for you unless your pageviews are extremely costly in terms of compute relative to the amount of data returned, and said data is very cache-friendly.

That's very much a niche requirement. To date I've not come across a setup where CloudFront made sense cost-wise.

To be honest I rarely use external CDNs and instead "roll my own" with a variety of providers as with cloud providers + geoip enabled DNS you can get 90% of the benefit at very low rates, but in terms of "brand name recognition" MaxCDN is worth checking. It's not nearly the maximum saving you can get, but it can be substantially cheaper than CloudFront.