As for staff salaries, lol. It's not like AWS is self administering.
The figures in the article are for illustration purposes only and should be taken with a large pinch of salt. The author doesn't detail what hardware they are running, what EC2 instances he has selected for comparison and how comparable the storage statistics are. I would also love to hear the Finance Department's version of his calculations.
AWS is more expensive than self-hosting. However, it is not as skewed as the author claims. Otherwise, very few companies would be using the cloud.
It is hard to believe how high cloud costs are.
I however would like to address some of your points which I find absolutely ridiculous:
> Staff salaries for administrators that maintain an on-premise data center
Every cloud-native company I've been at had an entire team wrangling YAML files around. I'm not exactly sure why they had to do so (because everything was stable and as you say, the cloud is supposed to handle all maintenance/etc for you) but they did and cost a pretty penny.
The only case where I genuinely agree that the "cloud" saves money on administration is fully-managed PaaS providers.
> The cost of keeping the servers powered 24/7
A non-cloud-based, peak-capacity-sized deployment costs less to run than a cloud-based deployment scaled at minimum capacity. Servers are super fucking cheap nowadays. Hetzner will happily sell you a 16-core, 128GB of RAM, 4TB redundant NVME SSD machine with 20TB of included external bandwidth for ~150 bucks a month. AWS will cost more than that on bandwidth alone.
There are a variety of other expenses associated with an on-premise environment considered indirect expenses. These expenses are often referred to as “hidden” expenses due to how often they are overlooked rather than “hidden.” These include:
The real estate of the storage space used for the servers
Tools used for temperature control in the data center
The cost of set up, configuration, and ongoing upgrades
Staff salaries for administrators that maintain an on-premise data center
Networking infrastructure set up and ongoing maintenance
The cost of downtime while the team troubleshoots the issue
Productivity lost when the system experiences downtime
The cost of keeping the servers powered 24/7
Depreciation of the hardware and software
Time spent on disaster recovery
Administrative costs associated beyond IT staff such as HR, purchasing, financing, and other departments.
https://pmsquare.com/analytics-blog/2022/6/9/calculating-on-...