Comment by time4tea
15 hours ago
Its true that aws is very expensive for a lot of use cases, as long as you only count the cost of the servers.
However, in most (every?) large organisations, buying a server and putting it in a DC, and looking after it, is hugely time-consuming, lengthy and expensive.
You need to get quotes, approvals, purchase, rack, commission, maintain etc etc. It is usually close to 1 year to get a server.
In some companies, even getting a virtual server takes almost as long!
With AWS, once an account and service is approved, boom, you are done.
My experience is exactly the opposite (company with more than 10k employees). Getting anything done in Azure takes me 10x as long, as all of Azure is managed by one team, and everything requires approvals, lots of bureaucracy. Also, as it turns out, it is extremely expensive. Per our guidelines everything needs to be isolated within company intranet (unless really required to be external), which often means we need premium tier services in Azure. These are really, really pricey sometimes.
On the other hand, if I request a virtual server, it takes less than a week, and I can work with it much more freely.
Let’s not forget capex/opex. You can bill an aws project to a project, datacenter costs or shared across the entire org and it’s prohibitively complicated to budget these per project.
Sure you can do it cheaper, but money isn’t really the problem. Most cloud spend is less than the cost of a handful of senior devs a month.
The article was talking about solo devs, small businesses, and startups. A few physical servers that can handle millions of request per day.