(note .. use 'which' not 'witch', quite different words)
Not sure if you mentioned it, but cost and scaling is an absurd trick of AWS and others. AWS is literally 1000s, and in some usage cases even millions of times more expensive than your own hardware. Some believe that employee cost savings help here, but that's not even remotely close.
Scaling is absurd. You can buy one server worth $10k, that can handle the equivalent of thousands upon thousands of AWS instances' workload. You can buy far cheaper servers ($2k each), colo them yourself, have failover capability, and even have multi-datacentre redundancy, immensely cheaper than AWS. 1000 of times cheaper. All with more power than you'd ever, ever, ever scale at AWS.
All that engineering to scale, all that effort to containerize, all that reliance upon AWS and their support system.. unneeded. You can still run docker locally, or VMs, or just pound it out to raw hardware.
So on top of your "run it on bare metal" concept, there's the whole "why are you wasting time and spending money" for AWS, argument. It's so insanely expensive. I cannot repeat enough how insanely expensive AWS is. I cannot repeat enough how AWS scaling is a lie, when you don't NEED to scale using local hardware. You just have so much more power.
Now.. there is one caveat, and you touch on this. Skill. Expertise. As in, you have to actually not do Really Dumb Things, like write code that uses 1000s of times CPU to do the same task, or write DB queries or schema that eat up endless resources. But of course, if you do those things on your own hardware, in DEV, you can see them and fix.
If you do those in AWS, people just shrug, and pay immense sums of money and never figure it out.
I wonder, how many startups have failed due to AWS costs?
Thanks and sorry for my English, even if I use it for work I do not normally use it conversationally and as a result it's still very poor for me...
Well I do not specifically talk about AWS, but in general living on someone else is much more expensive in OPEX than what it can be spared in CAPEX, and it's a deeply critical liability, specially when we start to develop on someone else API instead of just deploy something "standard" we can always move unchanged.
Yes, technical debt is a big issue but is a relative issue because if you can't maintain your own infra you can't be safe anyway, the "initial easiness" means a big disaster sooner or later, and the more later it is the more expensive it will be. Of course an unipersonal startup can't have on it's own iron offsite backups, geo replication and so on, but dose the MINIMUM usage of third party services trying to be as standard and vendor independent as possible until you earn enough to own it's definitively possible at any scale.
Unfortunately it's a thing we almost lost since now Operation essentially does not exists anymore except for few giants, Devs have no substantial skill since they came from "quick" full immersion bootcamps where they learned just to do repetitive things with specific tools like modern Ford model workers able only to turn a wrench and still most of the management fails to understand IT for what it is, not "computers" like astronomers telescopes, but information, like stars for astronomers. This toxic mix have allowed very few to earn hyper big positions, but they start to collapse because their commercial model is technically untenable and we start all paying the high price.
Not sure if you mentioned it, but cost and scaling is an absurd trick of AWS and others. AWS is literally 1000s, and in some usage cases even millions of times more expensive than your own hardware. Some believe that employee cost savings help here, but that's not even remotely close.
Scaling is absurd. You can buy one server worth $10k, that can handle the equivalent of thousands upon thousands of AWS instances' workload. You can buy far cheaper servers ($2k each), colo them yourself, have failover capability, and even have multi-datacentre redundancy, immensely cheaper than AWS. 1000 of times cheaper. All with more power than you'd ever, ever, ever scale at AWS.
All that engineering to scale, all that effort to containerize, all that reliance upon AWS and their support system.. unneeded. You can still run docker locally, or VMs, or just pound it out to raw hardware.
So on top of your "run it on bare metal" concept, there's the whole "why are you wasting time and spending money" for AWS, argument. It's so insanely expensive. I cannot repeat enough how insanely expensive AWS is. I cannot repeat enough how AWS scaling is a lie, when you don't NEED to scale using local hardware. You just have so much more power.
Now.. there is one caveat, and you touch on this. Skill. Expertise. As in, you have to actually not do Really Dumb Things, like write code that uses 1000s of times CPU to do the same task, or write DB queries or schema that eat up endless resources. But of course, if you do those things on your own hardware, in DEV, you can see them and fix.
If you do those in AWS, people just shrug, and pay immense sums of money and never figure it out.
I wonder, how many startups have failed due to AWS costs?