Does your company care about pricing?
Just out of curiosity, does the company that you work at care about cloud compute pricing?
The company that currently I work for is kinda price conscious (DO instead of AWS -- although we have some stuff there too -- but we would never choose a particular "#1 provider" on the OGF just for the pricing for example) given that it's a startup and costs do still matter at this stage, but I'm curious -- what type of company do you work for (startup/SMB/enterprise), and how much does price compared to company reputation factor into decision making?
At least from my standpoint, I can't think of why to choose VMWare products over Proxmox other than better support at an obscene price.
Comments
Yes, prices and services do matter at all the companies I have worked with. They keep a close eye on the recurring charges (and housekeeping). Preference is always on the OpenSource solutions rather than paid/pro ones
Yes (apparently, this is why the other day we chose Azure instead of AWS)
Ummm.. apples to oranges? I wouldn't be picky if you said DO instead of Lightsail, but AWS is more than just VPS (core IaaS)
Enterprise
Reputation matters a lot; at times, due to internal bureaucracy, unless we get a trusted third party in between (which would take its cut, but also the blame in case of a f*ckup), it's hard to get any deal approved with a company we haven't dealt in the past
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The first example is two different technologies I have no deep knowledge of, so I can't comment on that, but in general, depending on your use case (project scale + available skillset), support might matter, and the paid solution might save you labor costs. To give some anecdata:
1. Ideally, we would like to have more senior engineers on the team, but since there is a major skill shortage, with only a handful of CKAs/Linux ninjas available, we've ended up using OpenShift (which includes paid support from Red Hat) instead of vanilla k8s for our Kubernetes-backed SaaS running inside a private cloud environment - this lets us delegate investigations of most not-obvious-at-first-glance f*ckups, and focus on other stuff in the mean time.
2. Perhaps because we're short on people is why my boss seems to be more in favor buying than building (Although there is probably more to it). To give another concrete example, we're currently not using self hosted ELK/Prometheus, which most likely would be cheaper to operate (as far as cloud usage fees are concerend), but would require man-hours for building and maintaining - instead, we've settled for less labor intensive albeit pricier SaaS alternatives (Datadog, New Relic), thanks to which our scarce human resources can focus on other more important stuff
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I've worked with enterprise and government as well as running small and medium size businesses myself, so I think I have seen every side of the aspect.
With enterprise and government, the "who takes the blame" argument often wins over price. If you pay vmware a shitload of money, they will take the blame if it does not work. If you run Proxmox, you take the blame for running some unknown "open source homemade" solution. This is usually not as much on a technical level as a bureaucratic level, most techs know that it works just as well, but the people that holds the money doesn't believe it without the proper marketing behind it.
I cant even count the number of times I've walked in to big enterprises and governments as a consultant and asked about what they run or wants to run. The answers in the conference rooms are always Cisco, Palo Alto, Logpoint, VMWare, SCVMM and other big brands. Once you leave the executives and get into the datacenters and talk to the techs, things like Nagios, pfSense, Graylog and Grafana pops up all over the place.
The problem is that once a company reaches a certain size every decision are made by executives, not technicians.
No, like DO app platform, DO spaces (instead of S3), DO managed dbs, and their Droplets!
DO has a lot, actually
Sorry, to clarify: I meant core IaaS, not just VPS - Lightsail also has load balancers and managed containers (technically not IaaS anymore, but...
) and DBs.
Object storage is missing though.
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I work at a very big company. Like all big companies, price is important, but only insofar as we aren't pissing money up the wall. We use all the major technology brands to some degree, because they're the only vendors big enough and be able to work with us, so the choice is usually somewhat limited. We go through quite strict cost-control measures, and we wouldn't get away with awarding a contract on reputation or recommendation alone, but the number of vendors we could work with are often small.
A lot of what we do is subject to government and industry body regulation, so we need vendors who are able to work in that arena, and potentially bear some degree of liability if we're whacked with fines or suffer other reputational damage as a result of a failure in their hosting platform, for example.
My biggest victory is getting away with deploying Debian in one of our biggest projects when we're otherwise a RHEL-only shop!