Really appreciate how this isn't just another "cloud vs bare metal" holy war.The "own the core, rent the periphery" approach is exactly the kind of nuanced thinking we need more of in these discussions.
That said,important caveat for anyone reading this: Veridion is processing petabytes of data with predictable workloads. If you're still figuring out product-market fit or your usage patterns are all over the place, premature infrastructure optimization will absolutely kill you.The cloud's "boring reliability" has real value when you need to focus on building the actual product.
The 30x multiplier is real, but it only kicks in at serious scale with stable, known workloads. Most startups aren't there yet, and that's fine.
This is maybe the first “ditch the cloud” post that isn’t totally ideological. Makes sense for their scale + workload. I wish more companies ran the numbers instead of just accepting AWS bills as fate.
This is a super interesting analysis, I wonder what scale do you need to reach the point where the ease of adoption of AWS/GCloud is not worth it anymore. The article compares compute in each scenario, which makes sense, but I would take into account the speed to live as a secondary metric. I'm pretty sure cloud is faster, at least initially
the irony is cloud providers would love to sell a customer like this giant blocks of reserved compute. wonder if they actually negotiated or just said “lol too expensive” and bailed.
not sure i buy the “$2M/mo on cloud” number. did they actually run it or just plug public on-demand pricing into a spreadsheet? nobody pays sticker price at that scale.
That's a fair point, the scale discounts certainly matter. That said:
We did in fact run our prototype on AWS, and early on they flagged our account because our VMs were under heavy CPU load (we were told we'd need to cut below ~50 % or risk suspension).
When you switch to dedicated hardware, you're no longer paying for "noisy neighbours" or hypervisor over-provisioning, so the effective per-unit cost often cleaner fully justifies the shift.
Well, we do have some servers that we have in the office(the gpus servers, those have been a pain in the... mostly because intel cpus suck). But other then these the entire hardware part is managed by hetzner (thank you hetzner for being awesome)
the part about “predictable heavy workloads” should be bolded in neon. 90% of startups THINK they have predictable workloads. they do not. these guys actually do.
i would argue 90% of startups think they are going to need autoscaling, invest in that, and then never reach the scale up point, while having spent the investment money already.
besides the point of the article, tho. even if at the end of the day the numbers don't perfectly add up, i don't believe they are WAY OFF. we are paying for cables and HDDs man. "ancient" tech.