<story><title>As AWS Use Soars, Companies Surprised by Cloud Bills</title><url>https://www.theinformation.com/articles/as-aws-use-soars-companies-surprised-by-cloud-bills</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jdblair</author><text>When I joined a particular startup 4 years ago I was surprised that they owned their own servers mounted in racks in a rented colo. I was all, how retro! But then the head of IT showed me the cost savings over AWS and how he orchestrated it all using VMWare images, and I saw he had a point. He saved more than enough money to pay for his full time salary to keep it all going, even dealing with hardware maintenance. What was unique was that the company had a predictable load that didn&amp;#x27;t change much. If we had needed to change capacity level drastically over a regular cycle then AWS would have started to make sense.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Tistel</author><text>I have worked at a startup that was paying &amp;gt; 20k &lt;i&gt;per month&lt;/i&gt; for AWS.  I am certain the whole system could run on one dedicated blade.  There was just this culture (made easy with docker containers) of &amp;quot;spin up another box&amp;quot; for every silly little tool.  I have met self taught dev ops people who did not understand that you could create more than one user on a aws ubuntu machine.  I was like: &amp;quot;if cost is a big issue, then lets spin up one beefy machine and create users for each dev&amp;quot;, because thats what everyone using unix did back in the day (it works fine).  The reply was &amp;quot;thats not possible&amp;quot; so every dev got their own dedicated instance that was 99% idle.  We are paying &amp;gt;3k per month to aws and the business team is complaining about waste.  &lt;i&gt;sigh&lt;/i&gt;. old guy rant over.</text></comment>
<story><title>As AWS Use Soars, Companies Surprised by Cloud Bills</title><url>https://www.theinformation.com/articles/as-aws-use-soars-companies-surprised-by-cloud-bills</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jdblair</author><text>When I joined a particular startup 4 years ago I was surprised that they owned their own servers mounted in racks in a rented colo. I was all, how retro! But then the head of IT showed me the cost savings over AWS and how he orchestrated it all using VMWare images, and I saw he had a point. He saved more than enough money to pay for his full time salary to keep it all going, even dealing with hardware maintenance. What was unique was that the company had a predictable load that didn&amp;#x27;t change much. If we had needed to change capacity level drastically over a regular cycle then AWS would have started to make sense.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>drieddust</author><text>I agree completely.&lt;p&gt;I consult with multiple customers and they all want cloud. It&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;Cloud First&amp;quot; and any discussion to the contrary results in lost business. If you do that you are considered a Dinosaur.&lt;p&gt;On the issue of predictable load, most businesses not only have predictable load but a lot of capacity is just allocated and never used. VMware serves such scenarios even better by going for heavy over allocation. Everyone will demand 10 servers with 8vCPU, 64 GB of RAM without actually using even 10% of the allocated capacity.&lt;p&gt;But hey Cloud is cool so I have to be on it.</text></comment>