Now with AWS i can manage a whole infrastructre AND write code where you needed an admin team before.
If you just use EC2, though, you’ll find many other providers of virtual or dedicated servers for rent for much cheaper, with similar performance and reliability.
If you’re fully integrated in the AWS ecosystem, it is much more convenient, but also of course more expensive.
That said, unless you’re in silicon valley, your hiring costs will be so much lower than amazon’s that even your own admin team might end up cheaper than using Amazon’s.
Are you really replicating AWS or just EC2? How do you replicate S3? Glacier? What about Aurora (DB replication that actually works!). If all I need is raw compute, I can go back to building machines and beat AWS prices but I will have no where near the same level of functionality, flexibility, and now it is up to me to maintain them.
That’s a lot of wasted infrastructure and time managing it.
The second factor is levels of abstraction. It's cheaper to run your own virtualization software on rented dedicated hardware than to use EC2, and it's cheaper to run your own kubernetes cluster than to use EKS or GKE.
The places where having external companies do it sabes the most is (a) in running the actual hardware and networks and (b) providing a platform for your software (e.g. Google app engine).
Taking a bunch of rented dedicated servers and configuring kubernetes is cheaper than renting the computational power through GKE or EKS.
But basically yeah, these are the same standard solutions to saving money with hosting that have been pretty much known for decades.
EDIT: Be aware, this only applies for the publicly listed prices — if your company can get a deal like Snapchat did with Google, or Netflix with Amazon, then the math may work out entirely different. But I don't know what they pay so I can't comment on that.
How quickly can you scale up your design 10x? 100x?
Who needs to scale 100x in a matter of hours? For those companies, AWS may be very useful.
My entire point is that not everyone needs all the functionality AWS provides, and that’s where you can save the money.
Flexibility is a much bigger factor in using the cloud.
I've worked at organisations where "get N extra servers" was a 6-8 month process. Because of this you have to be extremely good at capacity planning.
And very few organisations are good at these guessing games.
Either you over-provision with a generous safety margin; or you don't - and your fail to handle peak loads.
Has it changed much? I haven't done real hardware in a while, but I remember the rack power to be a very limited resource years ago. (I.e. you could easily pack more hardware in the rack than you'd be allowed to power)
In London area (city and outskirts like Oxford) its £1500-2000 per 10kw and they count the PSU rating regardless of what you actually use. And that is on paper only as many DCs limit a rack to 20A which gives 4.8kw only so if you need more you need to lease another rack which costs more money. And leasing adjacent racks also isn’t really cheap they usually give you maybe 2-3 ones if you need more than that well then you are now leasing floor space which means if you need say one rack with 15kw rated bare metal you may end up having to lease enough room to hold 10 racks if not more.
This applies to AWS and GCP
That's an interesting data point considering EKS isn't GA yet.
Now we can make a simple case differentiation:
(a) EKS is more expensive than EC2. Due to Premise 1, that means EKS is more expensive than alternative hosters. QED.
(b) EKS is cheaper than EC2. Possible, but very unlikely, and I’m betting against this.
You can do 10x cheaper than AWS easily, if you are willing tomake tradeoffs that AWS just can't make globally for all their customers.
EDIT: If you’re paying silicon valley wages, and target a global audience with your site/product, and can get from AWS something cheaper than the publicly listed prices, then AWS very likely will be a good deal for you. But many companies have different needs than these, and may be able to save money by dropping things they don’t need.