I actually remember the old days and no bloody thank you. Sometimes you got arcana processes managed by barely technical sysadmins so it took you 5 months to get a VM and 2 months to reimage it if you broke it. Other times you got a free for all where every engineer configures an insecure never updated server that eventually gets hacked. Then you get paged at 2am when the thing explodes and get to spend two days rebuilding it. Especially fun when you didn't build it but simply inherited a magic undocumented machine from someone who left.

Personally I care more about my enjoyment of my day to day job than saving the company a tiny bit of money that they'll never give me.

Depends on the skill of the employees. If you have mostly juniors and people who don't care then AWS is a godsend. If you mostly hire capable seniors to lead and ambitious juniors to follow then you can run things the old way just fine.

My first job had only incompetent seniors that I had to explain SQL query performance to etc. I left very quickly since I realized I wouldn't learn much there. I can see such places benefiting greatly from AWS services.

>If you mostly hire capable seniors to lead and ambitious juniors to follow then you can run things the old way just fine.

Or you can run them even better on AWS assuming you had the same level of competence except in cloud deployments. Granted they'd probably pick a more specialized cloud platform than AWS for the specific problems and scale of the team.

> AWS managed to make things so much easier and cheaper compared to “classic” hosting that you now need twice as many devops employees and spend 10x in bills.

I'm far from a AWS fan but this take can't even be deemed an apples-to-orange comparison.

"Classical" hosting at best matches EC2. The absolute high-end "classical" hosting offers at best also offer something resembling EC2's VPC. Forget about regions, let alone anything resembling availability zones.

Everything else that AWS offers ends up being nice-to-have conveniences. Stuff like object storage and pub-sub and message queues and managed nosql and classical RDBMS services and managed kubernetes and integrated infrastrucure-as-code systems are way outside what a "classical" hosting company offers

I mean like, this is fun to say, but y’all know this isn’t actually true right? (Well, the free software part is, but the implication in the first sentence isn’t)

The past 10-15 years has seen enormous growth in eCommerce productivity as a portion of the overall economy (just google “gdp attributed to internet commerce” and similar phrases, there’s tons of data on this). The rise in the number of devops engineers and the amounts businesses spend on AWS hosting are often in service of business models that were simply impossible to even try before cloud computing.

Sure, everyone on HN seems to have a story about an organization going all “architecture astronaut”nuts with Kubernetes and then ending up with slower/more expensive infra, and it’s fun to tell those to each other, but there’s clearly a huge amount of economic activity being enabled here that wasn’t happening before.