this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2023
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This happens all the time. Companies are bleeding money into the air every second to aws, but they have enough money to not care much.
AWS really was brilliant in how they built a cloud and how they marketed everything as "pay only for what you use".
We worked with a business unit to predict how many people they would migrate on to their new system week 1-2 … they controlled the migration through some complicated salesforce code they had written.
We were told “half a million first week”. We reserved capacity to be ready to handle the onslaught.
8000 appeared week 1.
That this is deemed brilliant is the sad part.
I mean, I would put brilliant in quotes in the way that it's brilliant for their profits. Not brilliant in the way of making the world a better place.
Companies hate OpEx and love CapEx. That's the main driver as companies loathe hardware life cycle costs and prefer a pay as you go model. It is more expensive but it's more budget friendly as you avoid sticker shock every 3-4 years.
There's more than just hardware and power cost to servers.
Primarily cost of employees taking care of the servers.
Replacing hardware only every 6 to 8 years, makes it better.
Lawful Evil is still evil.
Do you mean that it's still the case that more resources are allocated than actually used or that the code does not need to be optimized anymore due to elastic compute?
I think both are consequences of the cloud.
It's cheaper for companies to just add more compute than to pay devs to optimize the code.
And it's also not so important to overpay for server capacity they don't use.
Both of these things leads to AWS making more money.
It's also really good for aws that once these things are built, they just keep bringing in money on their own 24 hours per day.
If I remember correctly, that was the original idea of AWS, to offer their free capacity to paying customers.
Do you think that AWS in particular has this problem or Azure and GCP as well? I have mainly worked with DWHs in Snowflake, where you can adjust the compute capacity within seconds. So you pay almost exactly for the capacity you really need.
Not having to optimize queries is a good selling point for cloud-based databases, too.
It is certainly still cheaper than self-hosted on-premises infrastructure.