I have yet to move a single customer to Amazon that fired the FTE who was managing on-prem infrastructure and chalked it up to a cost-savings move. . The idea of cutting headcount is a fallacy. In small shops the guy that was managing on-prem infrastructure is now doing that (because it turns out you still need switches and phones and routers and firewalls even if you host things in AWS) as well as managing the AWS infrastructure. In large shops you're typically replacing "cheap" headcount (the guy who racked servers) with someone significantly more expensive (a team of cloud architects).
We're a small company who avoided the hire. And we don't bother with a firewall at our office -- the only things on the office network are laptops, phones, printers, and sonos.
Basically, if you model senior eng time as $5k/week -- not even counting the opportunity cost -- you'll understand why AWS.
While I definitely think AWS is very expensive for the servers, they are not overall expensive. Again, setting up CloudWatch in an afternoon or dumping tons of heterogenous logs into S3 and querying them with Athena or spinning up full environment stacks (front end pool, back end pool, load balancers, databases, vpcs, vpns, etc) is an enormous cost savings vs finding, installing, configuring, and maintaining batches of software to do the same.
edit: pay an eng $180k. Fully loaded, you're looking at $220k plus. Add in either recruiting time or a recruiting fee that probably runs us $2k/mo amortized over the first year on the low end. Add in the fact that the first 6 weeks weren't super productive, and also absorbed tons of time from other SE to get this person up to speed. Add in PM time bringing this person up to speed on our product.
Or, you know, you could have brought in a consultant part time. If you're small enough that you can handle an AWS setup without someone full time, you could run on a managed hosting setup for less including an external consultant charging ridiculous hourly rates.
Clients on AWS were always my best ones, because they were used to paying so much over the odds I could set my rates much higher.
Yeah, I wanted an extra person on our desperately understaffed team, so I proposed I cut about a million bucks of spending year-on-year from AWS.
They didn't want to increase the head count. The AWS spend was a different silo/team/contract.
Corporate accounting is insane.
It almost smelled like "well, we negotiated this great AWS discount, so it doesn't bother us that we are spending an extra million. We're getting it at a DISCOUNT!"
Is there some MBA trend where every headcount is some ticking time bomb of liability that is 10x worse than their yearly salary?
You spend 150k on servers, they don't improve over a year.
You spend 150k on a decent employee, not even rockstar ninja 100xer, and they will deliver useful, although sometimes hidden, productivity and optimization.
On top of that add the opportunity cost of spending all that time managing/setting on prem infrastructure Vs solving business problems....there’s a good reason AWS and the likes have millions of customers today.
