> All the pro-cloud talking points... don't persuade anyone with any real technical understanding
This is a very engineer-centric take. The cloud has some big advantages that are entirely non-technical:
- You don't need to pay for hardware upfront. This is critical for many early-stage startups, who have no real ability to predict CapEx until they find product/market fit.
- You have someone else to point the SOC2/HIPAA/etc auditors at. For anyone launching a company in a regulated space, being able to checkbox your entire infrastructure based on AWS/Azure/etc existing certifications is huge.
You can over-provision your own baremetal resources 20x and it will be still cheaper than cloud. The capex talking point is just that, a talking point.
Your spend in the first year on AWS is going to be very close to zero for something like a SaaS shop.
Nor can you possibly scale in-house baremetal fast enough if you hit the fabled hockey stick growth. By the time you sign a colocation contract and order hardware, your day in the sun may be over.
This is a very engineer-centric take. The cloud has some big advantages that are entirely non-technical:
- You don't need to pay for hardware upfront. This is critical for many early-stage startups, who have no real ability to predict CapEx until they find product/market fit.
- You have someone else to point the SOC2/HIPAA/etc auditors at. For anyone launching a company in a regulated space, being able to checkbox your entire infrastructure based on AWS/Azure/etc existing certifications is huge.