Comment by sgarland
7 hours ago
> But until then it's a long term cost optimization with really high upfront capital expenditure and risk.
The upfront capex does not need to be that high, unless you're running your own AI models. Other than leasing new ones, as a sibling comment stated, you can buy used. You can get a solid Dell 2U with a full service contract (3 years) for ~$5-10K depending on CPU / memory / storage configuration. Or if you don't mind going older - because honestly, most webapps aren't doing anything compute-heavy - you can drop that to < $1K/node. Replacement parts for those are cheap, so buy an extra of everything.
And if each of your clients is in the Healthcare industry and dealing with end-user medical data? Or financial data? Are you prepared for appropriate data isolation/sharding and controls? Do you have a strategy for scaling database operations per client or across all clients?
It really depends on the business model as to how well you might support your own infrastructure vs. relying on a new backend instance per client in a cloud infrastructure that has already solved many of the issues at play.
> And if each of your clients is in the Healthcare industry and dealing with end-user medical data? Or financial data?
Then you're probably going to need some combination of HIPAA / SOC 2 / PCI DSS certification, regardless of where your servers are physically located. AWS has certified the infrastructure side for you, but that doesn't remove your obligations for the logical side.
> Are you prepared for appropriate data isolation/sharding and controls? Do you have a strategy for scaling database operations per client or across all clients?
Again, you're going to need that regardless of where your servers physically exist.
> vs. relying on a new backend instance per client in a cloud infrastructure
You want to spin up an EC2 per client, and run an isolated copy of the application, isolated DB, etc. inside of it? That sounds like a nightmare to manage, especially if you want or need HA capabilities.
No... just running a new hosted database instance per client... but (re)using your service/application infrastructure, but just connecting through a different database host/proxy based on the client for the request.
Just that utility at the database management layer is probably worth the price of entry for using cloud resources if you can't justify and cover the cost of say 5+ employees just for the data management infrastructure.
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