Comment

Comment by adrianmsmith

> The cloud excels at two ends of the spectrum ... The first end is when your application is so simple and low traffic that you really do save on complexity by starting with fully managed services .. The second is when your load is highly irregular

I think there's a third, which is when the company is so rich it just doesn't matter. Then saving even a little bit of employee time (which are more likely to be the bottleneck in such a company) is worth basically infinite spend.

I worked at a place where they spent $6k/month on cloud, just for a Java app not doing much plus a PostgreSQL database. I came up with a way to save $2k/month (better indexes), when I did it nobody cared or even noticed I think. I know that $2k/month might not sound like much, but I think the same principle would have been true even if it'd been much more. They spent about $2m/year on an external software development agency to create a React project, full of inefficient scrum meetings and billable hours from project managers and so on, and they didn't really care about that either.

Discussion

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton