>Our use case does not really need instant scaling all that much since we're a B2B business [...] His arguments are [...] we will scale to more production machines it would be easier to just start another VM than wait for a new dedicated server.
For most B2B businesses offering a SaaS product, I don't think on-demand variable "web scalability" is the decision framework for AWS/Azure/GCP.
Instead, it's really about faster product development iteration. If new SaaS product features can be delivered to market faster because it can leverage many of the higher-level managed services in the AWS/Azure tech stack portfolio like DynamoDB or Cosmos DB -- without your 5 dev team building the equivalent tech stack from scratch, that's when paying the profit margins to AWS/Azure are worth it.
In other words, your CTO and the devs have to look at your future product roadmap and see which features would require extra developer costs in re-inventing aspects of AWS/Azure that may negate the cost savings of a "dumb" IaaS like Hetzner.
> In other words, your CTO and the devs have to look at your future product roadmap and see which features would require extra developer costs in re-inventing aspects of AWS/Azure that may negate the cost savings of a "dumb" IaaS like Hetzner.
If there are actual development costs from moving from Azure to dedicated servers then they've already coupled to Azure and at a very early stage. The point of giving credits paid for for Microsoft. It would also seem they've unknowningly coupled too which should be worrying. I would be very worried about a CTO who unknowningly coupled to anything.
Also security, compliance, disaster recovery, many geographic / data locality issues, and maybe most importantly comfort-level for enterprise IT departments. For example we have a product in a regulated industry and running on AWS gets us past many of the hurdles our large customers throw up.
For most B2B businesses offering a SaaS product, I don't think on-demand variable "web scalability" is the decision framework for AWS/Azure/GCP.
Instead, it's really about faster product development iteration. If new SaaS product features can be delivered to market faster because it can leverage many of the higher-level managed services in the AWS/Azure tech stack portfolio like DynamoDB or Cosmos DB -- without your 5 dev team building the equivalent tech stack from scratch, that's when paying the profit margins to AWS/Azure are worth it.
In other words, your CTO and the devs have to look at your future product roadmap and see which features would require extra developer costs in re-inventing aspects of AWS/Azure that may negate the cost savings of a "dumb" IaaS like Hetzner.