[mattbeckman]

We spend ~$50k/mo on serverless infrastructure on AWS.

It hurts sometimes, given we were fully colocated about 4 years back, and I know how much hardware that could buy us every month.

However, with serverless infra we can pivot quickly.

Since we're still in the beta stage, with a few large, early access partnerships, and an unfinished roadmap, we don't know where the bottlenecks will be.

For example, we depended heavily on CloudSearch, until it sucked for our use case, so we shifted to Elasticsearch, and ran both clusters simultaneously until we were fully off of CS. If we were to do that on-prem, we'd have to order a lot more hardware (or squeeze in new ES cluster VMs across heavy utilization nodes).

With AWS, a few minutes to launch a new ES cluster, dev time to migrate the data, followed by a few clicks to kill the CloudSearch cluster.

Cloud = lower upfront, higher long term, but no ceiling. On-prem = higher upfront, lower long term, but ceiling.

[nojito]

Your costs are going to skyrocket in a nonlinear fashion as you exit the beta stage.

That’s the biggest counterpoint to using the cloud as a initial setup.

[brickbrd]

If "Cloud = lower upfront, higher long term, but no ceiling. On-prem = higher upfront, lower long term, but ceiling" is true, then how come the revenue of cloud companies keeps going up?

That would mean the incoming rate of users who are just starting off and find Cloud worthwhile is more exit rate of mature users who are finding on-prem more worthwhile than cloud

[wvenable]

If you're spending more than 50k/month on AWS where is the money to move to on-prem? When they got you, they got you.