On 17 December 2016 at 14:09, Sven Van Caekenberghe <s...@stfx.eu> wrote: [...] > > I think I understand your point, and in some specific situations that might > be true. But if you can only afford to pay $35 a month for your hardware, how > low must your income be ? Are you in a commercially viable enterprise then ? > > For a couple of $1000s you can get the equivalent of 10s if not up to 100 of > those instances. And that is still much less than office rent, let alone 1 > employee. > > The challenge today is not the cost of cloud hardware, it is simply building > and operating your application. That is assuming you can sell it enough to > make a living from it. >
Hi Sven, No disagreement. I should clarify that, although I'm writing these from my old email address, I'm not talking about a software development company these days. I am now the analyst, programmer, and system administrator for a long time client, and software is at the heart of what we do, but we don't make money from it directly. We have 2.2MLOC of Smalltalk, Common Lisp, Erlang, and PostgreSQL spread over 30 systems, 20 databases, and 160 data entry terminals. So, for example, while we need to sell concert tickets at an opening peak of 10,000 seats in the first hour 10 times per year, and while we deploy a dozen hardware-constrained gate admission nodes in a distributed cluster that must validate up to 1000 tickets per second, we also have some really complicated personnel scheduling and customer reporting applications. The former really can't be done in anything but Erlang where not just hardware but sysadmin cost is a factor. For the latter, I wouldn't choose anything other than Pharo+Seaside--for the same reasons you give. In a nutshell, we have, at times, startup/enterprise-class computing problems and costs funded by small business revenue. Mike
