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A lot of people in this thread should start consultancies that transition companies off the cloud.

Apparently, it would be easy for them to save tens of millions, in turn making millions for the consultant.



Couldn't agree more.

One only says this if they don't have a good understanding of the differences between capex & opex, the amount of money spent on tech labor & compliance projects, as well as the level of assurances AWS give you regarding durability of data. All of this in 2023 when we have almost 20 years of data showing more and more business moving to the cloud and staying in the cloud.

I think anti-cloud sentiment aligns with hacker mentality on decentralization=good (which it is), anti big corporation feelings (boo amazon) and so it leads people in these threads to make emotional arguments over something that is clearly going in the other direction. It's an excellent example of confirmation bias, trying to look for any and all justification to say the cloud is worse, when the majority of businesses have decided otherwise.


Have you even looked at S3 bandwidth pricing? I don't get how anyone using S3 for storing media or binaries can justify that outrageous price unless every download is connected to something making you money.


Well, step 1, have petabytes of data in S3, then don't pay the sticker price.

Step 2, write articles like this as part of your newly contracted "engagement" with Amazon to help justify the lower price.


>step 1, have petabytes of data in S3, then don't pay the sticker price.

So pay Amazon a bunch for the privilege to have lower prices. How about just starting off somewhere where you don't have to commit to paying a lot of money to get a reasonable price?


Because when you start out you don't know you'll need petabytes of storage.

Canva grew very quickly. I don't think it was a terrible call to use the cloud at the time.


Cloud isn't the issue. Using overpriced services is the issue. Regardless of size they shouldn't have used S3.


It's just a part of natural cycle.

Cloud became a fad a while ago, companies like Amazon/Google/MSFT rushed in burning cash to provide incentives. Now said companies adjust fees to milk businesses due to high exit cost, just because they can. This will inevitably create outflow of customers, however we are far from this point currently.


I do. Interested? :D On a small project, I managed to reduce costs by 70 times simply by transitioning and eliminating unnecessary features. This happened four years ago, and the project is still running smoothly. However, what I truly enjoy is providing an objective view of the actual cloud transition process to companies before they make any misguided decisions.


Just a commentary that if you could save a bunch of companies 70x then that is the easiest sell in the world. I WISH I could do something like that because I would be a billionaire haha.


Consultants who help to move to the cloud are not cheap too. And migration to AWS/Azure is still more common than out.


Pretty much the only go-backs that I have ever seen were when someone tried to forklift an onprem application that was never meant to run on a computer whose cpu cycles are metered. One of the most striking things to me in ops:dev relations was the way the conversation around performance and efficiency changed once we started paying for it by the cycle.


There is a lot of good money to be made for people who understand cloud cost structures and the alternative options available. You'll want to target mid-size businesses that bet on a cloud and were actually successful but are now drowning in cloud bills. Large companies will hire in-house expertise, and small companies don't spend enough for it to be worth hiring a contractor. But I really think there's a market of mid-size companies who don't know how to reduce their AWS bills. Cloud cost optimization (and perhaps migrations between clouds or to hybrid cloud/on-prem at times) would be a great business for a solo contractor. Being able to pay for your own contracting fee out of the savings is almost a given.


They could do it all in a weekend, easy.


The thing about economics is that it's physics, with a time delay. We are seeing the time-delayed reaction to over-extension into the cloud play out, not instantly but in the downturn cycle.


So do you think server hardware companies will do well during a downturn?




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