People really bought into the ‘people are more expensive than hardware’ as an excuse to get screwed like this. For $5k in human cost, these guys (and their investors) now save 200k/year in hosting. And this is not an isolated story; I am working on another one at this very moment. Programmers have become so incredibly sloppy with the ‘autoscaling’ and ‘serverless’ cloud ‘revolution’.
If it really did save time and were simpler, some companies would (quite reasonably) be willing to pay a premium for that - time is money and all that. In reality it seems like people often end up with the worst of both worlds - it’s expensive, complicated, still needs a huge staff to maintain, and doesn’t even work that well.
Tech like AWS Lambda (of which I like the theoretical idea) are meant to remedy the issues with complexity for a premium. But that premium makes, personally, my eyes water. I cannot see any high volume operation justifying going live with it. Are there big examples of those? And how is it justified vs the alternatives (which are, besides some programmer+admin time and scalability) far more efficient?
Its also not the initial time saving. After implementation, infrastructure maintenance is almost non-existent because the services are all managed for you and you can focus on providing direct value and not worrying about whether your infrastructure can meet your needs.
You also have to consider that there are limits to how parallel an application can be - Amdahl's Law - at some point even throwing hardware at a scaling issues has its limits.
Of course, there's also a truism that the team who implemented the first pass won't have to support (financially or as a developer) the software when it no longer scales.
In practice most software is light years away from this theoretical limit of "can't be anymore parallelised". And I fully agree that throwing hardware at a problem indeed has limits, although they are financial and not technical IMO.
As mentioned in another comment down this tree of comments, my 10-core Xeon workstation almost never has its cores saturated yet I have to sit through 5 seconds to 2 minutes of scripted tasks that can relatively easy be parallelised -- yet they aren't.
And let's not even mention how my NVMe SSD's lifetime saturation was 50% of its read/write limit...
There's a lot that can be improved still before we have to concern ourselves with how much more we can parallelise stuff. That's like worrying when will the Star Trek reality come to happen.
[0] http://datadraw.sourceforge.net/ (github; https://github.com/waywardgeek/datadraw as sourceforge seems down)
Edit; maybe I answered that last question by finding a github version: seems waywardgeek does maintain at least to keep it running.
https://diesel.rs ? Maybe https://tql.antoyo.xyz/ if you care more about ease of use.
That's like, a couple full-time developers, AIUI? Maybe even less than that. Perhaps the people who say "people are more expensive than hardware" have a point - at least in the Bay Area. Or you can move to the Rust Belt if you'd like a change.
