How We Saved $132k a Year With an IT Infrastructure Audit
A few people in the comments are saying &#x27;isn&#x27;t better to just setup your own SQL server instead of RDS?&#x27; and similar. I don&#x27;t want to post a reply to each, so I will say it here.<p>While I can totally sympathize from a programmer point of view (setting up, tweaking stuff and all is a great fun), but you need to ask yourself whether it is in the interests of business to do so. Especially if you&#x27;re working in a small team with no dedicated infrastructure staff or a startup with a short runway and a lot of urgent user facing changes.<p>Doing something on your own (e.g. setting up your own alternative to S3, or configuring your own SQL servers), comes with a cost and it&#x27;s not only the programming&#x2F;initial setup time. It&#x27;s also opportunity cost (instead of setting up a server, I could, for example, analyze some user data); maintenance (more things to worry about which you can outsource); skills set required to run the infrastructure (running your own SQL cluster requires more knowledge, more training than running one on RDS), etc.<p>So is it in the interest of the business to run your own infrastructure?<p>If you have thousands of servers and spending millions on it - probably, but then probably you can make an attractive deal with GCE or AWS :)<p>If your application needs some complex performance related stuff which is harder to do in the cloud (e.g. some custom hardware or whatever), then again, running your own infrastructure might be better.<p>But if you are like the majority of the companies&#x2F;products (you just need infrastructure to run reliably and performance should be just good enough), using AWS and friends might make a big difference.