Well, if the Zastava had 5-10x the amount of horsepower and storage space of the BYD for the same amount of money. Because that’s what is often the reality. Bare metal is unreasonably efficient compared to cloud services for not that much more know-how.

I do tech DD work for investment funds etc and one thing I often see are slow, complex and expensive AWS-heavy architectures that optimize for problems the company doesn’t have and often will never have. In theory to ensure stability and scalability. They are usually expensive and have nightmarish configuration complexity.

In practice complexity tends to lead to more outages and performance issues than if you had a much simpler (rented) bare metal setup with some spare capacity and better architecture design. More than half of serious outages I have seen documented in these reviews came from configuration mistakes or bugs in software that is supposed to manage your resources.

Nevermind that companies invest serious amounts of time in trying to manage complexity rather than remove it.

A few years ago I worked for a company that had two competing systems. One used AWS sparingly: just EC2, S3, RDS and load balancers. The other went berserk in the AWS candy shop and was this monstrosity that used 20-something different AWS services glued together by lambdas. This was touted as “the future”, and everyone who didn’t think it was a good idea was an idiot.

The simple solution cost about the same to run for a few thousand (business customers) as the complex one cost for ONE customer. The simple solution cost about 1/20 to develop. It also had about 1/2500 the latency on average because it wasn’t constantly enqueuing and dequeueing data through a slow SQS maze of queues.

And best of all: you could move the simpler solution to bare metal servers. In fact, we ran all the testing on clusters of 6 RPIs. The complex solution was stuck in AWS forever.

All aws is selling a web gui on top of free software. You still have to know ins and outs of the software to manage it properly.

Heck their support is shit too. I have talked to them to figure out an issue on their own in house software, they couldn’t help. My colleague happened to know what was wrong and fixed the issue with a switch of a checkbox.

+1 for bare metal! I wish I could convince more C level people that that's what we need most of the time.