> The last time I worked for a company that was invested in AWS, their AWS budget corresponded to five full-time senior developers in running costs.
This means nothing to me -- what is the TCO of the AWS deployment vs. the TCO of the non AWS deployment? How flexible are the different systems for the future? What are the reliability/uptime requirements and the marginal cost of outage? How replaceable are the dev ops engineers who are running your K8s/managed infra?
People moving to cloud isn't irrational. There's a reason that it's pervasive.
I can only speak of one PHP/TypeScript app with a poor performance profile: from $250/mo to $5.000/mo in running costs, not counting the migration. The team that made the app couldn’t maintain the Helm chart or the Terraform resources, adding to a DevOps team bottleneck that appears to limit how teams innovate (kind of how like creating new branches was expensive on CVS).
> How replaceable are the dev ops engineers who are running your K8s/managed infra?
I haven’t met a competent AWS DevOps engineer who wasn’t also competent to run the clusters; it’s just that they prefer not to.
> People moving to cloud isn't irrational. There's a reason that it's pervasive.
Yes, it’s made really solid. AWS makes sense to reduce operational risk at a large scale.
The price is not my main argument, although you’ve gotta make good money to justify the expense.
My motivation is to own one’s own infrastructure. I like to work on things that are both important and contented enough that you can’t, asa principle, outsource the operation.
It’s not either AWS or “bring your soldering iron”. Self-hosting K8s on managed hardware is still insanely cheaper than AWS.
GitOps, infrastructure as code, DevOps platforms, CNCF best practice setups are entirely doable without paying the Amazon tax. If your lead DevOps quits, you’re right, it’s easier to find someone who does AWS.
The last time I worked for a company that was invested in AWS, their AWS budget corresponded to five full-time senior developers in running costs.
It’s not much different than outsourcing DevOps, which I think is what some hackers frown upon, because that’s their skillset you buy in town at a premium.