Comment by tqi

You're falling into the false dichotomy that always comes up with these topics: as if the choice is between the cloud and renting rack space while applying your own thermal paste on the CPUs. In reality, for most people, renting dedicated servers is the goldilocks solution (not colocation with your own hardware). You get an incredible amount of power for a very reasonable price, but you don't need to drive to a datacenter to swap out a faulty PSU, the on site engineers take care of that for you. I ordered an extra server today from Hetzner. It was available 90 seconds afterwards. Using their installer I had Ubuntu 24.04 LTS up and running, and with some Ansible playbooks to finish configuration, all in all from the moment of ordering to fully operational was about 10 minutes tops. If I no longer need the server I just cancel it, the billing is per hour these days.

Bang for the buck is unmatched, and none of the endless layers of cloud abstraction getting in the way. A fixed price, predictable, unlimited bandwidth, blazing fast performance. Just you and the server, as it's meant to be. I find it a blissful way to work.

AWS also made huge inroads in big companies because engineering teams could run their own account off of their budget and didn’t have to go through to IT to requisition servers, which was often red tape hell. In my experience it was just as much about internal politics as the technical benefits.

Computing power (compute, memory, storage) has increased 100x or more since 2005, but AWS prices are not proportionally cheaper. So where you were getting a reasonable value in ~2012, that value is no longer reasonable, and by an increasing margin.

raises hand I ran a small SaaS business in the early 2000s, pre-AWS.

Renting dedicated servers was really expensive. To the extent that it was cheaper for us to buy a 1U server and host it in a local datacenter. Maintaining that was a real pain. Getting the train to London to replace a hard drive was so much fun. CDNs were "call for pricing". EC2 was a revelation when it launched. It let us expand as needed without buying servers or paying for rack space, and try experiments without shoving everything onto one server and fiddling with Apache configs in production. Lambda made things even easier (at the expense of needing new architectures).

The thing that has changed is that renting bare metal is orders of magnitude cheaper, and comparable in price to shared hosting in the bad old days.

> But maybe things have changed in ways that meaningfully changes the calculus?

I'd argue that Docker has done that in a LOT of ways. The huge draw to AWS, from what I recall with my own experiences, was that it was cheaper than on-prem VMware licenses and hardware. So instead of virtualizing on proprietary hypervisors, firms outsourced their various technical and legal responsibilities to AWS. Now that Docker is more mature, largely open source, way less resource intensive, and can run on almost any compute hardware made in the last 15 years (or longer), the cost/benefit analysis starts to favor moving off AWS.

Also AWS used to give out free credits like free candy. I bet most of this is vendor lock in and a lot of institutional brain drain.

One factor was huge amounts of free credits for the first year or more for any startup that appeared above-board and bothered to ask properly.

Second, egress data being very expensive with ingress being free has contributed to making them sticky gravity holes.

Answers here

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cloud-adoption-frame...

TL;DR version - its about money and business balance sheets, not about technology.

For businesses past a certain size, going to cloud is a decision ALWAYS made by business, not by technology.

From a business perspective, having a "relatively fixed" ongoing cost (which is an operational expense ie OpEx ) even if it is significantly higher than what it would cost to do things with internal buy and build out (which is a capital expense cost ie CapEx), make financial planning, taxes and managing EBITDA much easier.

Note that no one on the business really cares what the tech implications are as long at "tech still sorta runs mostly OK".

It also, via financial wizardry, makes tech cost "much less" on a quarter over quarter and year over year basis.

Et al is for people, Et cetera is for things.

Edit: although actually many people on here are American so I guess for you aws is legally a person...

It was the accountants. CapEx vs. OpEx.