>If you're a startup who wants to minimize capex and quickly spin up a reliable, secure infra to host your app on to get it out of the door ASAP, you would go with cloud.

But that's exactly what Etsy isn't. They've been around for years. It's a stable, mature business (at least by the standards of the sort of business they're in). What possible advantage could they gain from switching to this cloud?

Some executive will get to lead a big cloud migration project, which will look great on their résumé when they bounce to their next job a few years later.

Oh, you meant advantages for the company? Never mind.

I chuckled at this comment, but this is actually a very astute observation. I've seen it happen way too many times (and destroy many companies and people's lives) to laugh about it :(.

It's called RDD. Resume driven development

Access to dozens of services that AWS offers, that you'd want to utilize entirely on their networks ideally. That service list is only going to keep expanding. The cost for Etsy to duplicate and maintain any of those, is high. AWS is also likely to be one of the leading platforms for AI services/tools, which Etsy will no doubt want to make heavy use of in the future; that's another expensive duplication effort if they do it all in-house.

Let's say AWS has 50 services today. Etsy won't have to duplicate any of those by building & maintaining their own versions. It's an extraordinarily time consuming and expensive process to do so. The capabilities AWS can enable will get greater, while the expense to replicate on your own what AWS can do, will also climb. The extrapolated result, is that AWS & the others will perpetually take market share for the next 10+ years from do it yourself approaches. More for the software duplication expense (time & money), than the hardware/bandwidth cost difference.

Uhh, it literally says "Google Cloud" right there in the headline. Not AWS.

> If you're a startup who wants to minimize capex and quickly spin up a reliable, secure infra to host your app on to get it out of the door ASAP, you would go with cloud.

Why on earth would a startup waste money like that? Just rent a few servers, most places will have it up in a few minutes, guaranteed, any large provider have automated that long ago. Much, much cheaper than the cloud. It seems, even in this thread, that there are two choices: cloud or colo. Hell no to either. Rent dedicated -- yes.

The only reason one would go with the cloud is if you plan to use their services ie not EC2 but the many others. However, those can have a runaway cost too and it's not clear whether a new startup should take on handcuffs like that -- once you decided you are depending on SQS etc it'll be hard to move to elsewhere.

> Why on earth would a startup waste money like that?

Because the cost of hosting a typical startup, even on GCP, is trivial compared to a single engineer's salary.

It really depends. When we were starting out keeping our hosting costs low with dedicated servers kept us afloat.

We actually make an effort to cut our hosting costs while expanding capacity pretty much every year now because Intel keeps making better chips.

"If you're a startup who wants to minimize capex and quickly spin up a reliable, secure infra to host your app on to get it out of the door ASAP, you would go with cloud."

I agree, but I don't think that's the market either.

I think the market is in massive big-corps, moving their IT infrastructure to the cloud.

Like regular, non-tech companies.

Small startup bills might be hundreds, thousands, possibly 100's of K but probably not millions. Big corp contracts may be millions - and stable.

At megacorp scales, you're wasting money going to the cloud unless your load profile is highly variable. GCP/AWS profit margins are very high versus bare metal, and if you're megacorp scale you can afford ops and bare metal you can depreciate over several years.

(and before you trot out Netflix, the vast majority of their bits are served out of OpenConnect appliances colocated at eyeball ISPs and peering points)

I recently watched a Mega Corp fire the entire IT Ops department and hire a handful cloud consultants to move all of their current vSphere (thousands of VMs) infrastructure to Azure.

The rationalization was that in the long run it was cheaper to maintain the status quo, and not have to worry about networking, firewall, and replication issues by hand. I'm pretty sure MS also gave them a large discount at that scale.

I don't doubt it. The winds change often, sometimes quickly. People going to move to the cloud, people going to move back to on-prem, as sure as the sun is going to rise.

My hunch is you'll see a lot of move back on-prem during the next downturn when hardware providers need to move a lot of hardware under duress while businesses look at cutting their opex (you have to pay for cloud compute/storage forever, whereas you can run on paid gear for the cost of power, network, cooling, space, and the tech people you need anyway).

To quote Warren Buffet, “You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out."

"and if you're megacorp scale you can afford ops and bare metal you can depreciate over several years."

Don't assume this.

I worked at a 'big tech company' that made a very popular device.

Our IT was a disaster.

We made one of the world's most popular gadgety things - we couldn't make our email work.

Doing things the right way is extremely expensive sometimes, you have to pay zillions for consultants and they can screw it up.

If 'IT' is not a massive cost - often - the consideration is moot - move it to the cloud where things will work, and there is low overhead.

I'll bet $100 that Amazon is earning those margins easily.

Another example: why do companies use Windows instead of Linux which is free? Well, because Linux in a regular corp environment would be a huge nightmare. $50/employee to get something that works? That's dog-food heap. It's hardly a consideration, easy, just buy it. Maybe MS margins are huge. Who cares, because the value they created is monster.

Sometimes 'point and click' IT is worth a lot given all the risk factors etc. etc..

Most big orgs are dysfunctional. Moving to the cloud doesn’t fix company culture.

Yes, but it can take a bunch of paint points away.

If you think about it- why on earth did companies start having massive servers in the first place?

That was an anomoly.