alt Hacker NewsYour calculation assumes that an FTE is needed to maintain a few beefy servers.
Once they are up and running that employee is spending at most a few hours a month on them. Maybe even a few hours every six months.
OTOH you are specifically ignoring that you'll require mostly the same time from a cloud trained person if you're all-in on AWS.
I expect the marginal cost of one employee over the other is zero.
> Once they are up and running
You should also calculate the cost of getting it up and running. With Google Cloud (I don't actually use AWS), I mainly worry about building docker containers in CI and deploying them to vms and triggering rolling restarts as those get replaced with new ones. I don't worry about booting them. I don't worry about provisioning operating systems or configuration to them. Or security updates. They come up with a lot of pre-provisioned monitoring and other stuff. No effort required on my side.
And for production setups. You need people on stand by to fix the server in case of hardware issues; also outside office hours. Also, where does the hardware live? What's your process when it fails? Who drives to wherever the thing is and fixes it? What do you pay them to be available for that? What's the lead time for spare components? Do you actually keep those in supply? Where? Do you pay for security for wherever all that happens? What about cleaning, AC, or a special server room in your building. All that stuff is cost. Some of it is upfront cost. Some of it is recurring cost.
The article is a about a company that owns its own data center. The cost they are citing (5 million) is substantial and probably a bit more complete. That's one end of the spectrum.