[none2585]

I'm curious how many engineers per year this costs to maintain

[CaptainOfCoit]

> I'm curious how many engineers per year this costs to maintain

The end of the article has this:

> Consider custom infrastructure when you have both: sufficient scale for meaningful cost savings, and specific constraints that enable a simple solution. The engineering effort to build and maintain your system must be less than the infrastructure costs it eliminates. In our case, specific requirements (ephemeral storage, loss tolerance, S3 fallback) let us build something simple enough that maintenance costs stay low. Without both factors, stick with managed services.

Seems they were well aware of the tradeoffs.

[codedokode]

And I am curious how many engineer years it requires to port code to cloud services and deal with multiple issues you cannot even debug due to not having root privileges in the cloud.

Without cloud, saving a file is as simple as "with open(...) as f: f.write(data)" + adding a record to DB. And no weird network issues to debug.

[rajamaka]

> as simple as "with open(...) as f: f.write(data)"

Save where? With what redundancy? With what access policies? With what backup strategy? With what network topology? With what storage equipment and file system and HVAC system and...

Without on-prem, saving a file is as simple as s3.put_object() !

[beoberha]

A lot of reductive anti-cloud stuff gets posted here, but this might be the granddaddy of them all.

[mjr00]

> Without cloud, saving a file is as simple as "with open(...) as f: f.write(data)" + adding a record to DB. And no weird network issues to debug.

There may be some additional features that S3 has over a direct filesystem write to a SSD in your closet. The people paying for cloud spend are paying for those features.

[RedShift1]

Ah that is where logging and traceability comes in! But not to worry, the cloud has excellent tools for that! The fact that logging and tracing will become half your cloud cost, oh well let's just sweep that under the rug.

[hinkley]

Variation on an old classic.

Question: How do you save a small fortune in cloud savings?

Answer: First start with a large fortune.

[nbngeorcjhe]

A small fraction of 1, probably? It sounds like a fairly simple service that shouldn't require much ongoing development

[codedokode]

Especially if you have access to LLMs.

[hinkley]

You're going to run a production system with a bus number of 1?

I think you mean a small fraction of 3 engineers. And small fractions aren't that small.

[UseofWeapons1]

Yes, that was my thought as well. Breakeven might be like 1 (give or take 2x)?

[hinkley]

Anything worth doing needs three people. Even if they also are used for other things.

[codedokode]

What I notice, that large companies use their own private cloud and datacenters. At their scale, it is cheaper to have their own storage. As a side business, they also sell cloud services themselves. And small companies probably don't have that much data to justify paying for a cloud instead of buying several SSDs/HDDs or creating SMB share on their Windows server.