Yeah, I have to strongly disagree with that. Sure, AWS can be stupidly expensive, however it can also save you a lot of money.
A few years ago, I was the VPoE for a small-ish startup in Denmark. I was the only ops person, and I was able to provide 100% uptime for a year, including a migration from k8s clusters, AWS AZ outages and whatnot. During that time, I also reduced our monthly spend from $15k to $5k. This was a fully auto-scaling, redundant and highly available system.
When I started, every night I got woken up by alerts (working alongside the CEO and another engineer to fix things). By the time I had stabilised things, the only thing waking us up were our providers having outages.
I used to run a similar business earlier, without AWS. We owned our own hardware and had ops people going to data centres. I can guarantee you we did not spend less than $12-13k/month (AWS fee + my salary) in that company. Think closer to $100-150k/month.
AWS can be cheaper when you factor in the cost of employees. It can also be stupidly expensive when you use it the wrong way.
Another example: I host a small service that gets very seldom, seldom use. Maybe 20-50 people discover it and use it per month. I have the backend running on a Lambda, and it costs me about $0.5 per month. It took me 20 minutes to write the CloudFormation for that and push it through my CI pipeline to have it deployed. There is no way I could get cheaper hosting, uptime/availability, and faster time to market than with a Lambda.
If and when that service becomes more used where it warrants running full time, I’ll rewrite the request handling and throw it in my k8s cluster. But until then, I do believe this is the cheapest solution (for me).
> ... I also reduced our monthly spend from $15k to $5k. This was a fully auto-scaling, redundant and highly available system.
I believe you, but most people don't do this, sadly. You very clearly _get_ Cloud, but most don't, and financial optimisations often come much later down the line.
I have a similar story, though from almost 10 years ago, so maybe things have changed. As VPoE for a small startup with mobile messaging apps (something like a couple million MAU and ~200M messages/month), I orchestrated a lift-and-shift from a top tier managed hosting provider to AWS EC2. The result was about a 60% drop in monthly spend on hosting. We used almost nothing except S3 and EC2, with some provisioned IOPs for our SQL backend.
That said, it was a long time ago, and I'm sure competition and prices have changed dramatically.
Yeah that Lambda setup you mention is terribly cheap, and it is one of the very few extremely attractive services pricewise - but many people get lured into using other AWS services that aren't cheap, even though Amazon makes people think so by blurring the total price by splitting it into hours, calculating egress separately, dependencies on services that are billable by the hour (it's not obvious when you start that a private network has the cost of an NAT GW attached to it). Using only Lambda is really cost effective but frankly, few people resist the temptation and use it the way you described.
> it's not obvious when you start that a private network has the cost of an NAT GW attached to it
It’s not actually required.
And I don’t mean the completely unrealistic “if you run stuff on your private network that never needs to connect to the internet, then you don’t need a NAT gateway!”. I just mean you can implement routing to the internet in cheaper ways.
If you don’t need 100Gbps highly available outbound traffic routing like a NAT gateway provides… you run a t3.nano instance doing forwarding and NAT that will sustain 30Mbps and burst to 5Gbps for $3.80/mo. Just on raw bandwidth, unless you need more than a t3.large can push (~500Mbps continuous, 5Gbps burst), it’s cheaper to run an EC2 instance as your gateway rather than use a NAT gateway.
A few years ago, I was the VPoE for a small-ish startup in Denmark. I was the only ops person, and I was able to provide 100% uptime for a year, including a migration from k8s clusters, AWS AZ outages and whatnot. During that time, I also reduced our monthly spend from $15k to $5k. This was a fully auto-scaling, redundant and highly available system.
When I started, every night I got woken up by alerts (working alongside the CEO and another engineer to fix things). By the time I had stabilised things, the only thing waking us up were our providers having outages.
I used to run a similar business earlier, without AWS. We owned our own hardware and had ops people going to data centres. I can guarantee you we did not spend less than $12-13k/month (AWS fee + my salary) in that company. Think closer to $100-150k/month.
AWS can be cheaper when you factor in the cost of employees. It can also be stupidly expensive when you use it the wrong way.
Another example: I host a small service that gets very seldom, seldom use. Maybe 20-50 people discover it and use it per month. I have the backend running on a Lambda, and it costs me about $0.5 per month. It took me 20 minutes to write the CloudFormation for that and push it through my CI pipeline to have it deployed. There is no way I could get cheaper hosting, uptime/availability, and faster time to market than with a Lambda.
If and when that service becomes more used where it warrants running full time, I’ll rewrite the request handling and throw it in my k8s cluster. But until then, I do believe this is the cheapest solution (for me).