Getting our applications out of the cloud provided the main celebration for our exit, but seeing the actual spend tumble is the prize. See, the only way to get pricing in the cloud down from obscene to merely offensive is through reserved instances. This is where you sign up for a year or more in advance on a certain level of spend. Th...
Amazon is actually quite smart. They give away tons of free compute in the form of free tier lambda functions, enough to convince any hobbyist to comfortably port all of the home built stuff to the cloud for free, but not enough that any serious business can run cheaply.
Then they wait for someone to suggest using the tool they use at home for the company, and rake in the rewards.
It’s pretty crazy how “millions of requests per day” is somehow enough to warrant paying the Amazon price for cloud stuff. A $50 VPS can handle millions of requests per day with capacity to spare. If you’re in a real pinch, get a $100 dedicated server somewhere.
Computers are crazy fast. If you cut out all of these layers of abstractions, you’ll be surprised how little hardware you actually need to run the equivalent of cloud stuff. You’re not done for that cheap (you need to set up failovers, backups, and so on) but with the ridiculous prices Amazon and Azure charge, it’s worth running the numbers.
The only problem with that approach is that your product will slow down if you suddenly get an influx of millions of customers, something that never happens to 99% of companies considering cloud stuff.