At my previous startup: because AWS gave us a bunch of credits and helped us design the infra. It meant we ran for free what they designed for free.

At a previous bigger company, getting procurement to sign up to a new provider requires writing a business case, justifying the spend and then getting multiple competing quotes and speaking to their sales teams. Signing up to a new service takes _months_ even for $10/mo as they’ll negotiate for bulk discounts and the best possible terms for something that will literally cost less per year than one of meetings they hold to discuss the “value”. Meanwhile on AWS I can click a button in the marketplace and it gets thrown in the AWS account which is pre approved spending.

> they said they must show they are on Hyperscaling cloud.

This is the main reason; and it applies to developers (they need cloud buzzwords on their resume), it applies to managers (who in turn hire only those with said buzzwords) and it applies to company execs/CTOs who can brag about the complex (self-inflicted) problems their company is solving at the next cloud provider conference, so they can justify yet another VC round.

Run this for over a decade, and you'll end up in a situation where an entire generation of "engineers" is no longer capable of configuring a Linux box to serve some basic webapp and will make up whatever reasons to avoid even attempting to do so.

I think AWS is liked is because when AWS started, being able to get a new VPS up in minutes was still quite unusual. Many hosts would require about 24hr, I suspect, for getting a new VM up. At least those are some experiences I had. But nowaways, they are probably many options for getting a VM instantly.

I agree that it's overcomplicated. Although having the self-service portal also for assigning IPs is useful. But most of it seems overkill. Although, being able to detach storage from VMs and such is also quite flexible. But still.

It's fairly easy to setup services without worrying about pages.

I can stand something up on AWS in a couple hours and be fairly confident it will run reliably (assuming their service offering is actually decent--some suck)

We test backups and they never fail. Metrics and logs always work.

>People are unnecessarily complicating stuff, and these clouds can go very expensive very quickly.

I don't think that's the cloud vendors fault. They make it easy to stand up new services so people get overly enthusiastic and create convoluted architectures. Have Postgres but need full text search? OpenSearch is just a few clicks (well hopefully IaC config..) away, let's use that! When you're building yourself and need to setup the stack, instrument, monitor, configure backups the cost is high enough where you say "hey, maybe pg fts is fine for now"

> spending $20k a month on GCP

> burning money in cloud

I suspect there's two reasons why this happens.

One is just the disassociation with opex that seems ever present in the VC model. The other is that many startups settle in on a ops solution before hiring ops and the cost of switching isn't that attractive until they're faced with a dwindling runway and a down round.

I worked for a startup company - the founders were really nice people and had put their own money in - quite a lot of money - to get the software built for the vision they had.

By the time I joined, 18 months after development had started, a giant, complex, hideously tentacled software beast had been built that used every possible AWS service that the massive offshore team of developers could find to use.

It should have been built on a single Linux box by a single senior developer with Python and Postgres or nodejs or Ruby or whatever.

They went out of business after not too long and I couldn't help wondering if things might have been different if they hadn't spent a fortune building a giant money making machine for AWS, instead of making a web application on a Linux box.

Every AWS project I have worked on has had some significant work put into programming AWS instead of writing business functionality.

The ease of getting things set up quickly and usually for free when starting up is very tempting. Later, migration is usually considered risky and not worth it because of maintenance overhead - which I would argue has become very easy.

Grafana (and especially Loki) is hot garbage compared to what you get out of the box in GCP. I'm in a Grafana organization today and the sheer amount of developer and devops time it wastes is mind boggling.

You moved something from a single datastore to three different database technologies? I don't know your domain, but that sure doesn't sound like a complexity reduction.

This isn’t a like for like comparison though, is it.

You removed all of their logging and all of their redundancy and reliability and replaced it with shitters that will all explode if the small providers one data centre goes down.

And if someone penetrates this mega server, they’ll be able to wipe all your logs or tamper with them, to hide the attack.

If your storage servers go down, everything they have is gone. And these providers don’t offer the finest hardware. How do you know all of those drives aren’t from the same batch? They will be, because they’re a bulk buyer with a single data centre.

Credits. It wouldn't make sense without free credits. And when you are hooked, good luck in moving out.