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Ask HN: What portion of your cloud budget is spent on VMs?

1 points by dvasdekis ↗ HN
I've come up with a way of dynamically bidding on spot instances across multiple clouds that results in VM compute (bare metal or containers) that's a fraction of the normal cost (think 80%+ cheaper than reserved, 50%+ cheaper than standard spot).

But, to be worth the effort to turn this into a proper framework that you could use to run a container via Terraform, I'm trying to quantify what portion of the 'average' cloud spend is VMs, as opposed to managed SaaS products (message queues, serverless databases, S3, etc). I don't want to spend the time solving a problem if nobody has the problem anymore.

If you're reading this and work in cloud, could you kindly comment a rough % of what you've seen being spent on raw VMs as opposed to SaaS services, now and historically?

Thanks!

4 comments

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jhugo
I would say on average the % is higher among companies that would be operationally capable to run across multiple clouds. We made the conscious decision to buy mostly commodity services from clouds in order to be able to easily use multiple clouds, and ~70% of our cloud budget is VMs. If we were buying higher-level managed services the % would be lower and we'd be less able to utilise something that bid across multiple clouds.