> As a consultancy company, you want to sell that. As a customer, I don't see how that's worth it at all.
Well I do rather agree, but as a consultancy I'm biased.
But let's do some math. Say it's 4 months (because who has uninterrupted time), a senior rate of $1000/day. 20 days a month, so 80 days, is an $80k outlay. That's assuming you can get the skills (because AWS et al like to hire these kinds of engineers).
Say one wants a 3 year payback, that is $2,200/month savings you need. Which seems highly achievable given some of the cloud spends I've seen, and that I think an 80-90% reduction in cloud spend is a good ballpark.
The appeal of a consultancy is that we'll remove the up-front investment, provide the skills, de-risk the whole endeavour, even put engineers within your team, but you'll _only_ save 50%.
The latter option is much more appealing in terms of hiring, risk, and cash-flow. But if your company has the skills, the cash, and the risk tolerance then maybe the former approach is best.
EDIT: I actually think the(/our) consultancy option is a really good idea for startups. Their infrastructure ends up being slightly over-built to start with, but very quickly they end up saving a lot of money, and they also get DevOps staffing without having to hire for it. Moreover, the DevOps resource available to them scales with their compute needs. (also we offer 2x the amount of DevOps days for startups for the first year to help them get up and running).
this assumes there are no devops/consulting cost to setup something with AWS. My experience is that "the aws way of doing XYZ" is almost as complicated as doing it the non-AWS-way.
On top of that: the non-AWS-way is much more portable across hosting providers, so you decrease your business risks considerably.
I wholeheartedly agree, I'm trying to be generous as I know I have a bias here.
I think the AWS way made clear sense in the days before the current generation of tooling existed, when we were SSH-ing into our snowflake servers (for example). But now we have tools like Kubernetes/Nomad/OpenShift/etc/etc, the logic just doesn't seem to add up any more.
The main argument against it is generally of the form, "Yes, but we don't want to hire for non-cloud/bare-metal". Which is why I think a consultancy provides a good middle ground here – trading off cost savings against business factors.
Can you recommend any resources on how to approach the topic for a startup? Most startups have very similar needs, but every single "batteries included" solution that I've encountered so far explicitly excluded infrastructure and DevOps – either because it's out of scope for the creators, or because that's what they monetize (e.g. supabase).
I don't have practical experience in that, but .NET Aspire looks like the thing you might want (and it has some support of non-.NET on both backend and frontend).
Basically the idea is that you define your infrastructure in a rather short .NET script (e.g. for example postgres + backend + frontend + auth service) and the tooling then lets you either download all the components and launch the whole thing locally, or generate a script of some kind to deploy it to an infrastructure provider (type of script depends on provider). And it provides extensive logging, monitoring, tracing etc out of the box for the majority of the included components with API endpoints and dashboards.
How about we have a chat? I think it is hard for startups to justify implementing this infrastructure from scratch because that is a lot of time & skills that are really best focussed elsewhere.
Well, it at least assumes the cost to setup the AWS way is sunken. What is a given for anybody that may hire them.
But if you are starting from scratch instead of looking for someone to help you migrate, then yeah, the AWS way has probably higher setup costs than making it portable.
Well I do rather agree, but as a consultancy I'm biased.
But let's do some math. Say it's 4 months (because who has uninterrupted time), a senior rate of $1000/day. 20 days a month, so 80 days, is an $80k outlay. That's assuming you can get the skills (because AWS et al like to hire these kinds of engineers).
Say one wants a 3 year payback, that is $2,200/month savings you need. Which seems highly achievable given some of the cloud spends I've seen, and that I think an 80-90% reduction in cloud spend is a good ballpark.
The appeal of a consultancy is that we'll remove the up-front investment, provide the skills, de-risk the whole endeavour, even put engineers within your team, but you'll _only_ save 50%.
The latter option is much more appealing in terms of hiring, risk, and cash-flow. But if your company has the skills, the cash, and the risk tolerance then maybe the former approach is best.
EDIT: I actually think the(/our) consultancy option is a really good idea for startups. Their infrastructure ends up being slightly over-built to start with, but very quickly they end up saving a lot of money, and they also get DevOps staffing without having to hire for it. Moreover, the DevOps resource available to them scales with their compute needs. (also we offer 2x the amount of DevOps days for startups for the first year to help them get up and running).