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A comment on Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers? by taylodl on Thursday May 05, 2022 @09:10AM (#31272843)
You must have missed the part where I said But here's one thing I can say about applications that we've moved to the cloud: they cost 30% as much to host in the cloud as they do on-premise, and that's not even accounting for the entirety of all the costs I enumerated above!

Every app I've migrated to the cloud so far has resulted in a 70% cost reduction, but I'm also not trying to take my entire application portfolio to the cloud. To wit, we're not planning on abandoning our data centers anytime soon and that's not just because we can't move our applications to the cloud fast enough. At this point in time we recognize there are some applications best kept on-premise - but they're a minority, maybe 20% tops of my application portfolio. That means 80%+ of my application portfolio can be moved to the cloud, makes sense to move to the cloud, and I can save 70% on costs by doing so. That's a fantastic deal!

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Re:Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers? by quanticle on Thursday May 05, 2022 @03:23PM (#31277430)
Have you done an audit in the other direction? How many "cloud native" apps do you have, which would realize similar cost reductions from moving to on-prem? The point I was trying to make is that many companies, especially newer startups, don't even discuss on-prem as an option. They build everything cloud-native from day 1, which then leads to them painting themselves into a corner like I described above. They're having to totally redesign and rearchitect their application, not because their business requirements dictate it, but to conform with AWS' limitations.
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Re:Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers? by taylodl on Friday May 06, 2022 @08:51AM (#31284523)
It's May 6, 2022. You're launching your startup next month. Are you going to host on-prem? What, with server equipment backlogs now 4-6 months, and that's if you're a large enterprise customer? Network equipment backlogs are now in the 8-12 month range. Not to mention the cost of needing conditioned power, cooling, staff, space, etc. You're going to utilize the cloud. It'd be insane to do otherwise.

You do raise a fair point - what about the applications that are more economical to host on-prem? In my own portfolio I estimate 20% or so of my applications make more sense to host on-prem. What to do about those?

The most practical option is to mandate every application you build in the cloud have a plan for how to run on-prem. Note those that would be very difficult to run on-prem - those are your key cloud dependencies. For example, in my own portfolio I have a couple of applications depending on Lex and therefore would be very difficult to host on-prem.

Pay special attention to your so-called "crown jewels" - your apps that distinguish you from your competitors. If those were dependent on a key technology such as Lex and would be difficult to migrate on-prem then you need to identify other cloud providers you could migrate to. In this particular example I know Microsoft's and Google's clouds both offer similar services.

If you design and build your applications with no thought of the future then you're already in a bad position.

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Re:Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers? by quanticle on Saturday May 07, 2022 @05:27AM (#31293196)
It's May 6, 2022. You're launching your startup next month. Are you going to host on-prem? What, with server equipment backlogs now 4-6 months, and that's if you're a large enterprise customer?

On-prem or cloud, why would I be waiting until 1 month before launch to provision anything?

You're pretending like on-prem is full of all these physical limitations, but Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, et. al. can just magically make hardware appear out of nowhere. It's the same hardware, subject to the same supply limitations, and I'm going to be paying either way. Either I pay more per hour for my cloud instances, or I pay a bunch up front to provision my on-prem servers.

Cloud makes sense if the load on your service is intermittent or unpredictable enough that you're okay paying AWS's premiums in order to have the ability to scale on demand. But if the load on the services is knowable, then hosting that service on the cloud is paying a 25% markup for no reason whatsoever. AWS is by far the most profitable portion of Amazon's business units. Those profits are coming from somewhere. They're coming from your business.

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