If the use case is somebody developing a software product that is a totally other scenario.
“Building a company is hard enough, adding the overhead of actually building a company is madness”
> But that's a lot of hidden work that could have been allocated to launching the product faster.
The topic of this thread isn't about a brand new start-up with no resources trying to build their product as much as possible, it's about a company that spends millions in cloud invoices.
Building a company using AWS, totally legit. Scaling this usage up to millions of dollars because you don't want to manage the hassle, fair enough it's your money, I don't mind if all your profit goes to Amazon really…
One big pain that no one seems to mention are the mundane details that come with running your own DC. Even in our fairly small operation we had half of a person dedicated to maintaining the warranties on the hardware, sourcing replacement hard drives for 10yo servers, disposing of retired hardware, purchasing new hardware, etc.
These things take a huge amount of focus and don't contribute to your product at all. The "cloud" has removed all of this busywork and I wouldn't go back to the old way for almost any amount of money.
Or we have seen all of this and that's exactly why we don't want it.
Building a company is hard enough. Adding the overhead of developing, maintaining, recruiting for, and staffing our own datacenter is madness when I can click a few buttons and get the same thing from a cloud provider without hiring anyone extra to manage the datacenter.
No one is denying that a proper data center management system can exist. We all know it can exist.
The issue is that it's a huge distraction with a lot of potential pitfalls. Your network infrastructure with Cradlepoint LTE radios in the colocation cages sounds great after it works, gets set up, stays documented, and all the bugs have been ironed out. But that's a lot of hidden work that could have been allocated to launching the product faster.