6 ms·

"It's like: Stacking cash on the sidewalk and lighting it on fire" Is an accurate description of a large number of products that I have been forced to use afte

"It's like: Stacking cash on the sidewalk and lighting it on fire" Is an accurate description of a large number of products that I have been forced to use after various CTOs have played golf with a vendors sales team.

BetaCygni 11y ago
Except that lighting cash on fire would be more fun and take less time ;)
- tonyedgecombe 11y ago
  and it gives off heat so has some use.
  - liotier 11y ago
    I know farms of unused servers that provide plenty of heat !
    - mdellabitta 11y ago
      Is that another plain-English name for EC2, as well?
inopinatus 11y ago
It is not an accurate description, however, of the economics or value proposition of Direct Connect. When we're moving TB to an off-cloud location it's almost a no-brainer. Similar when latency sensitive. The highest barrier, quelle surprise, is dealing with interconnect telcos.
- nissimk 11y ago
  Yeah, and at certain data centers it is as simple as ordering a cross connect. There are many AWS services and each have many use cases where the customer is getting an excellent value. Unfortunately, just like deciphering all of the names is very difficult as OP demonstrated so well, understanding the use cases where you can get a good value as a customer is also esoteric and poorly documented. While AWS has pretty good docs in general for each service. Most of the naive implementations presented in tutorials and docs would not be a valuable reason for a customer to use the service. I wonder if documenting this type of stuff better would help them grow the business or if they just don't care and they want to just rip off as many faces as possible. I guess in traditional enterprise software, this is always the role of the consultants / partners rather than the role of the vendor. The vendor sales guy always just wants you to take the license that puts the most money in his pocket and it is up to those partners and consultants to explain to you how to optimize your usage and licensing.
Sir_Cmpwn 11y ago
I've found that nearly any use-case of AWS is like "stacking cash on the sidewalk and lighting it on fire". It's very overpriced and there's a lot of smoke and mirrors involved in figuring out how much you're paying. Disclaimer: I work at Linode, but have felt this way since before I started.
- bkeroack 11y ago
  Running a business on AWS is like taking Uber to work every day. At some point it makes sense to just buy the car.
  - stevewilhelm 11y ago
    > Running a business on AWS is like taking Uber to work every day. At some point it makes sense to just buy the car. To make the analogy accurate: Running a business on AWS is like taking Uber to work every day. At some point it makes sense to just buy the car, hire a driver, find a good mechanic, lease a parking spot, purchase automobile insurance, remember to buy gas, deal with speeding tickets, schedule regular maintenance .... At some point it makes sense, but it is way, way down the road for most startups.
    - bkeroack 11y ago
      Empirically I've found that point to be at approximately the $30k/month spend rate (somewhere around 4-5 years in--arguably no longer strictly a "startup"). Of course it's pretty context-dependent, YMMV, etc.
      - samstave 11y ago
        For what type of service though? Netflix spends millions on AWS -- but it would never make sense for them to do it themselves. My average was ~$140K per month -- and it would NOT have made sense to do self DC. Right now, im deploying from DC to AWS and dropping my cost and increasing my performance...
    - 11y ago

BetaCygni 11y ago

Except that lighting cash on fire would be more fun and take less time ;)

tonyedgecombe 11y ago
and it gives off heat so has some use.
- liotier 11y ago
  I know farms of unused servers that provide plenty of heat !
  - mdellabitta 11y ago
    Is that another plain-English name for EC2, as well?

inopinatus 11y ago

It is not an accurate description, however, of the economics or value proposition of Direct Connect. When we're moving TB to an off-cloud location it's almost a no-brainer. Similar when latency sensitive. The highest barrier, quelle surprise, is dealing with interconnect telcos.

nissimk 11y ago
Yeah, and at certain data centers it is as simple as ordering a cross connect. There are many AWS services and each have many use cases where the customer is getting an excellent value. Unfortunately, just like deciphering all of the names is very difficult as OP demonstrated so well, understanding the use cases where you can get a good value as a customer is also esoteric and poorly documented. While AWS has pretty good docs in general for each service. Most of the naive implementations presented in tutorials and docs would not be a valuable reason for a customer to use the service. I wonder if documenting this type of stuff better would help them grow the business or if they just don't care and they want to just rip off as many faces as possible. I guess in traditional enterprise software, this is always the role of the consultants / partners rather than the role of the vendor. The vendor sales guy always just wants you to take the license that puts the most money in his pocket and it is up to those partners and consultants to explain to you how to optimize your usage and licensing.

Sir_Cmpwn 11y ago

I've found that nearly any use-case of AWS is like "stacking cash on the sidewalk and lighting it on fire". It's very overpriced and there's a lot of smoke and mirrors involved in figuring out how much you're paying. Disclaimer: I work at Linode, but have felt this way since before I started.

bkeroack 11y ago
Running a business on AWS is like taking Uber to work every day. At some point it makes sense to just buy the car.
- stevewilhelm 11y ago
  > Running a business on AWS is like taking Uber to work every day. At some point it makes sense to just buy the car. To make the analogy accurate: Running a business on AWS is like taking Uber to work every day. At some point it makes sense to just buy the car, hire a driver, find a good mechanic, lease a parking spot, purchase automobile insurance, remember to buy gas, deal with speeding tickets, schedule regular maintenance .... At some point it makes sense, but it is way, way down the road for most startups.
  - bkeroack 11y ago
    Empirically I've found that point to be at approximately the $30k/month spend rate (somewhere around 4-5 years in--arguably no longer strictly a "startup"). Of course it's pretty context-dependent, YMMV, etc.
    - samstave 11y ago
      For what type of service though? Netflix spends millions on AWS -- but it would never make sense for them to do it themselves. My average was ~$140K per month -- and it would NOT have made sense to do self DC. Right now, im deploying from DC to AWS and dropping my cost and increasing my performance...
  - 11y ago