Item — HN Reader

> Cloud services (AWS/GCP/Azure) only make sense for smoothing out unusual/seasonal peaks, or support rapid growth. If you are 100% cloud based, you’re throwing away large money every month.

Absolutely. Lots of loss-making companies out there spend millions on their budget on these services only to help make their providers turn an easy profit.

This is why they continue to beg for more funding rounds in return of less control of their companies and end up still being unprofitable even in their Series X even.

1 comments

Hi. I'm a novice developer. Could you give me an example of a non cloud based hosting provider please? I'm not sure I understand the point the author makes.

You lease colocated servers at more competitive rates (power and bandwidth included), or buy them and install them in leased racks, or build your own datacenters. Cloud providers charge a lot in return for not requiring this kind of commitment; they have to amortize datacenters and support staff with a lot of spare capacity.

Yes and they also let small shops actually spend their time developing software instead of managing infrastructure. I know how to and have done all of the infrastructure and managed services that we farm off to AWS.

You can get away with a lot less dedicated infrastructure staff if you use your cloud provider as more than just a glorified overpriced colo and actually take advantage of their managed services.

Just to keep comments from going off the rails and everyone says it’s a mistake not to have dedicated “infrastructure people”. I’m a software engineer still by choice, but I have turned down a few offers as an “AWS Architect”.

My thought on that is your rough revenue over infrastructure + development + maintenance cost is what matters. There is google/facecrack in one corner of that problem space and a chain smoking accountant with a ledger in another corner. You are likely not in either of those places.