Yeah, I keep getting clients come to me because of the complexity of their cloud setups, and they invariably end up paying far more than the guys running stuff on dedicated hosting. Most of them also pay 2x-3x as much for the hosting itself...
I think a lot of these setups grow by accretion because people are able to push things onto them within purchasing mandates they have because of monthly fees that can slowly grow through discrete approvals rather than having to justify large capital expenditures upfront, or even seeking approval for contracts for monthly payments vs. running up per-minuter or per-hour or per-GB charges...
I suspect a lot of the enthusiasm for these services would vanish if more engineering teams actually had to produce cost estimate, budgets and after-the fact accounting of operational costs for the stuff they build...
I think as a startup, though, offering these kind of platforms as open source is ingenious, because you get mindshare, but people soon enough will run into enough pain to want to offload the pain on someone else - either hiring devops/ops people, contracting it out, or coming to your startup begging you to run it for them.
Certainly, it's great for people like me who do consulting part time that people don't know how to do this, as it's far easier to justify my rate when I can ask to see their hosting costs and be able to point out to them that the monthly cost savings they'll get will cover the fees in 3-4 months.
I think a lot of these setups grow by accretion because people are able to push things onto them within purchasing mandates they have because of monthly fees that can slowly grow through discrete approvals rather than having to justify large capital expenditures upfront, or even seeking approval for contracts for monthly payments vs. running up per-minuter or per-hour or per-GB charges...
I suspect a lot of the enthusiasm for these services would vanish if more engineering teams actually had to produce cost estimate, budgets and after-the fact accounting of operational costs for the stuff they build...
I think as a startup, though, offering these kind of platforms as open source is ingenious, because you get mindshare, but people soon enough will run into enough pain to want to offload the pain on someone else - either hiring devops/ops people, contracting it out, or coming to your startup begging you to run it for them.
Certainly, it's great for people like me who do consulting part time that people don't know how to do this, as it's far easier to justify my rate when I can ask to see their hosting costs and be able to point out to them that the monthly cost savings they'll get will cover the fees in 3-4 months.