Re:We use our own hardware at Fastmail
by shortsunblack on Sunday December 22, 2024 @12:12PM
(#42487661)
You can over-provision your own baremetal resources 20x and it will be still cheaper than cloud. The capex talking point is just that, a talking point.
Re:We use our own hardware at Fastmail
by swiftcoder on Sunday December 22, 2024 @02:55PM
(#42488616)
As an early-stage startup?
Your spend in the first year on AWS is going to be very close to zero for something like a SaaS shop.
Nor can you possibly scale in-house baremetal fast enough if you hit the fabled hockey stick growth. By the time you sign a colocation contract and order hardware, your day in the sun may be over.
> You have someone else to point the SOC2/HIPAA/etc auditors at.
I would assume you still need to point auditors to your software in any case
This is a very engineer-centric take. The cloud has some big advantages that are entirely non-technical:
- You don't need to pay for hardware upfront. This is critical for many early-stage startups, who have no real ability to predict CapEx until they find product/market fit.
- You have someone else to point the SOC2/HIPAA/etc auditors at. For anyone launching a company in a regulated space, being able to checkbox your entire infrastructure based on AWS/Azure/etc existing certifications is huge.