I mean AWS optimization is a valid consultancy/self employment career; it's like tech debt in coding, you make it work first, prove that it works, get value from it, and only then look into optimizing.
Would these clients have been able to make the upfront investment to set up their own racks and hire / train the relevant staff? That's the sales pitch for AWS and other cloud providers, you can get started a lot faster, make money, only then look into optimizing.
Running your own servers is easy to underestimate. Running it with the reliability, backup and fallbacks that cloud providers offer is also easily overlooked. How much does it cost to set up a multi region cluster yourself?
That said, there are some real life examples of companies that moved away from AWS in favor of their own servers, like Dropbox which bootstrapped on AWS, then built their own eight years later (https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/15/why-dropbox-decided-to-dro...).
> you can get started a lot faster, make money, only then look into optimizing.
IME, companies often will first fall into the trap of minimum spend with AWS for larger discounts, such that even when you _do_ try to optimize things, it doesn’t matter. There is no greater disincentive than saving 5 digits per month, only to be told “thanks, but it doesn’t matter.”
Tangentially, I think the rise of cloud and SaaS to blame more than anything for the I-shaped engineer. Why bother learning anything about optimization when K8s will silently add another node to the cluster as needed? Why bother learning SQL when ORMs abound, and your Serverless DB will happily upsize to deal with your terrible schema? After all, you’re being told to ship, ship, ship, so there’s not really any time to learn those things anyway.
I simultaneously love and hate cloud providers, and am eagerly awaiting the slow but steady turn towards on-prem/colo. 37Signals has the right idea.
Would these clients have been able to make the upfront investment to set up their own racks and hire / train the relevant staff? That's the sales pitch for AWS and other cloud providers, you can get started a lot faster, make money, only then look into optimizing.
Running your own servers is easy to underestimate. Running it with the reliability, backup and fallbacks that cloud providers offer is also easily overlooked. How much does it cost to set up a multi region cluster yourself?
That said, there are some real life examples of companies that moved away from AWS in favor of their own servers, like Dropbox which bootstrapped on AWS, then built their own eight years later (https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/15/why-dropbox-decided-to-dro...).