[raghava]

Points to be noted.

1. It took the end of ZIRP era for people to realize the undue complexity of many fancy tools/frameworks. The shitshow would have continued unabated as long as cheap money was in circulation.

2. Most seasoned engineers know for the fact that any abstractions around the basic blocks like compute, storage, memory and network come with their own leaky parts. And that knowledge and wisdom helps them make the suitable trade-offs. Those who don't grok them, shoot themselves in the foot.

Anecdote on this. A small sized startup doing B2B SaaS was initially running all their workloads on cheap VPSs incurring a monthly bill of around $8K. The team of 4 engineers that managed the infrastructure cost about $10K per month. Total cost:$8K. They made a move to 'cloud native' scene to minimize costs. While the infra costs did come down to about $6K per month, the team needed new bunch of experts who added about another $5K to the team cost, making the total monthly cost $21K ($6K + $10K + $5K). That plus a dent to the developer velocity and the release velocity, along with long windows of uncertainty with regards to debugging complex stuff and challenges. The original team quit after incurring extreme fatigue and just the team cost has now gone up to about $18K per month. All in all, net loss plus undue burden.

Engineers must be tuned towards understanding the total cost of ownership over a longer period of time in relation to the real dollar value achieved. Unfortunately, that's not a quality quite commonly seen among tech-savvy engineers.

Being tech-savvy is good. Being value-savvy is way better.

[ghomem]

Thanks for sharing the story. Despite the whole TCO being higher, I wonder how the 8K to 6K reduction happened.

On AWS, fargate containers way are more expensive than VMs and non fargate containers are kind of pointless as you have to pay for the VMs where they run anyway. Also auto scaling the containers - without making a mess - is not trivial. Thus, I'm curious. Perhaps it's Lambda? That's a different can of worms.

I'm honestly curious.

[raghava]

> I wonder how the 8K to 6K reduction happened.

As said, most of their workloads were on cheap VPSs before. Moved some to 'scale-to-zero' solutions, reduced the bloat in VMs, fixed some buggy IaC, also moved some stuff to the serverless scene. That got a decent ~20% reduction.