Why is AWS so expensive?!? Asking for a friend!
I've been a fan of AWS since I first discovered it back in 2006. It blew my mind: "OMG you can provision up to 20 servers and pay 10c/server/hour". I also love the agility and flexibility where cloud resources can be quickly created and destroyed. So I struggle to wrap my brain around companies not wanting to use it or similar clouds.
However, these days there are quite a few articles about companies migrating off public clouds (AWS, Azure, GCP) to "private clouds". For example, the Pragmatic Engineer's The Pulse #105: More trad tech companies to move off the public cloud? describes the latest Barclays biannual chief information officer (CIO) survey that found that "8 out of 10 CIOs say they plan to move part of their compute to a private cloud, where they control the infrastructure".
Similarly, another Pragmatic Engineer article Building Bluesky: a Distributed Social Network (Real-World Engineering Challenges) described how Bluesky moved off AWS to Vultr and got "hardware that was more than 10x as powerful as before, for a fraction of the price".
How is this possible? After all, one of the early arguments for cloud computing is that the economy of scale would make it more cost effective. Also, cost comparisons can be be tricky. I remember receiving some really negative feedback about a 2008 conference talk about AWS where I mentioned that storage cost of (AFAIR) 10c/Gig/month. The attendee was outraged "I can buy a hard drive from Fry's for far less". Of course, that's an apples to orange comparison.
I haven't done a serious cost analysis. And this might be the pendulum effect where so much time has passed that people have forgotten the drawbacks of traditional infrastructure. But there certainly appear to be cheaper alternatives to AWS. But why? What about the economies of scale argument? Or have private clouds evolved? Is there a scale tax? Does operating a public cloud at massive scale require lots of sophisticated, expensive proprietary technology that requires an equally immense R&D budget?
What are your thoughts?
On a mission to innovate | AWS Premier Partner
2moGreat post, Chris. Definitely a conversation I've seen companies are having lately, especially from teams who’ve outgrown their initial AWS setup or never fully optimised it. Often it’s not AWS itself that’s the problem, it’s how it’s being used. At Cloud Bridge, we work with companies to bring visibility and control back through AWS-funded FinOps programmes, helping reduce spend without sacrificing scalability.
Cultivating Engineering Excellence Culture • SOFTWARE ARCHITECTURE • TRAINING & DEVELOPMENT
8moAWS is expensive for these two reasons to start (there are others, but for time's sake, I'll limit it to these): 1. Like many businesses, they increase prices until customers are uncomfortable. * This also allows them to give deep discounts to Enterprise customers who sign multi-year contracts. 2. They have successfully transferred the responsibility of a cost-efficient cloud setup to their clients. *If the bill is too high, you are responsible for reworking your application architecture to make it cheaper. - Stop using EC2 and start using Lambda. - Stop using S3 and start using Glacier. - Stop running in real-time and run that process as a batch.
A bunch of our customers (or, rather, my last company's customers) asked for the "hybrid" approach (local data, cloud control plane) because of the regulations — their InfoSec teams felt better physically controlling the sensitive data.
Application Modernization Architect DDD/Event Storming/Strategy/Innovation
10moI've seen rhetoric surrounding "serverless" and specifically the complexity of event-driven architectures. My theory is that a lot of engineers and "architects" are young and only have a vision of software through full-stack development, which is often very monolithic (even though they do build microservices). So, the idea of using on-prem virtual servers is attractive. I don't even think colleges are teaching event-driven architectures or the cloud. The kids are still using python and building REST web apps. It's only those of us that have been around for a long time see all the strengths and weaknesses of varying architectures that also see the ways to leverage the cloud.
Product Development, Global business development, CTO. Leader and Mentor.
11moIf there was another business reason that allowed you to build your own infrastructure, then private cloud is a no-brainer. This sort of thing happens often when you have government contracts.