When your AWS bill suddenly spikes to $69k because some data science intern left a huge gpu backed EC2 instance running in ap-southeast-2 with a misconfigured auto-scaling group, and your CTO is at a "digital transformation" conference, and you have hundreds of angry investors asking why your burn rate tripled, you’ll get it.

Or you need to debug why your Lambda function is throttling and you find out that the CloudWatch logs were never properly configured and you’ve been flying blind for three months.

And finally you have a brilliant idea of hiring a second $150k/year AWS solutions architect so that at least one person can actually understand the bill and they can check each other’s Terraform configs. Suddenly, you’re spending $300k on two cloud wizards alone and the cost savings of "not managing your own infrastructure" are completely gone.

The snide rebuttal basically writes itself.

> When your cheap dedicated server goes down and your admin is on holiday and you have hundreds of angry customers calling you, you'll get it.

Or when you need to post on Hackernews to get support from your cloud provider as locked out of your account, being ignored and the only way to get access is try to create as much noise as possible it gets spotted.

Or your cloud provider wipes your account and you are a $135B pension fund [1]

Or your cloud portfolio is so big you need a "platform" team of multiple devops/developer staff to build wrappers around/package up your cloud provider for you and your platform team is now the bottleneck.

Cloud is useful but it's not as pain free as everyone says when comparing with managing your own, it still costs money and work. Having worked on several cloud transformations they've all cost more and taken more effort than expected. A large proportion have also been canned/postponed/re-evaluated due to cost/size/time/complexity.

Unless you are a big spender with dedicated technical account manager, your support is likely to be as bad as a no name budget VPS provider.

Both cloud and traditional hosting have their merits and place.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/google-cloud-acciden...

It is statistically far more likely that your cloud service will go down for hours or days, and you will have no recourse and will just have to wait till AWS manage to resolve it.

After 8 years operating like this, I have had approximately the same number of critical outages in standard Cloud as with these providers.

One included a whole OVH building burning down with our server in it, and recovery was faster than the recent AWS and Cloudflare outages.

If you want to, these providers also offer VMs, object storage and other virtualized services for way cheaper with similar guarantees, they are not stuck in the last century.

And I don’t know how people are using cloud, but most config issues happen above the VM/Docker/Kubernetes level, which is the same wether you are on cloud or not. Even fully managed database deployments or serverless backends are not really that much simpler or less error-prone than deploying the containers yourself. Actually the complexity of Cloud is often a worse minefield of footguns, with their myriad artificial quirks and limitations. Often dealing with the true complexities of the underlying open-source technologies they are reselling ends up being easier and more predictable.

This fearmongering is really weakening us as an industry. Just try it, it is not as complex or dangerous as they claim.

That's even worse when AWS goes down and myth of it never going down should be more than shattered by now

Sure, but AWS has more downtime than I do :-)

When your system goes down on AWS and your AWS admin is on holiday, you'll have the same problem.

What is your point?

What prevents an EC2 instance from going down in exactly the same way? Other hosting providers offer automatic backup too - it's not an AWS exclusive feature.

If you own your own hardware, but you can provision a leased dedicated server from many different providers in an hour or three, and still pay far less than for comparable hardware from AWS.

Which is an awesome capability, if you need it.

I suspect that if you broke projects on AWS down by the numbers, the vast majority don't needed it.

There are other benefits to using AWS (and drawbacks) bit "easy scaling" isn't just premature optimisation because if you build something to do something it's never going to do that's not optimisation it's simply waste.

But on Hetzner, you can usually get a dedicated server installed and ready tomorrow.