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Reddit went on the cloud bandwagon not because they thought it was superior to managed servers, but because Conde Nast's IT department sucked. With the ongoing

by rms 17y ago

Reddit went on the cloud bandwagon not because they thought it was superior to managed servers, but because Conde Nast's IT department sucked. With the ongoing growth, they were having trouble procuring the additional servers as needed, and moving Amazon solved that problem.

pavs 17y ago
Can you give us any reference to the "Condé Nast's IT department's fault" theory? From the best of my knowledge reddit infrastructure was always maintained by reddit stuff and Condé Nast had no influence on that. The current reddit stuff did an "Ask me Anything" thread on reddit when the founders left and they said the reason for the move to AWS was purely because of price/scaling issues and some part of reddit was already using AWS even before Condé Nast bought them.
jedberg 17y ago
That's not entirely true. Yes, it is true that getting servers was hard, and that was definitely a factor. But the bigger factor for me was that I was tired of having to build, image and rack all those servers. I liked the flexibility of EC2, and also not having to waste resources ordering a full rack's worth of hardware every time. Cost was also an issue. Datacenter space in SF is expensive, but it had to be in SF, because that is where I was. EC2 proved to be much cheaper than physical servers. I also like the fact that I don't have to run to the datacenter anymore when there is an issue. I just file a ticket with Amazon.
- rms 17y ago
  OK, thanks for the clarification. I'm trying to find the post I read that gave me that idea but can't find it. Was it in in your AMA?
  - jedberg 17y ago
    Could have been. Or possibly something Spez said.
    - rms 17y ago
      I thought it could have been a spez or kn0thing post but I went through all of them and couldn't find anything. I guess it could have been deleted, but I'm going to chalk this up to faulty memory on my part; you were there.

by rms 17y ago

pavs 17y ago

Can you give us any reference to the "Condé Nast's IT department's fault" theory? From the best of my knowledge reddit infrastructure was always maintained by reddit stuff and Condé Nast had no influence on that. The current reddit stuff did an "Ask me Anything" thread on reddit when the founders left and they said the reason for the move to AWS was purely because of price/scaling issues and some part of reddit was already using AWS even before Condé Nast bought them.

jedberg 17y ago

That's not entirely true. Yes, it is true that getting servers was hard, and that was definitely a factor. But the bigger factor for me was that I was tired of having to build, image and rack all those servers. I liked the flexibility of EC2, and also not having to waste resources ordering a full rack's worth of hardware every time. Cost was also an issue. Datacenter space in SF is expensive, but it had to be in SF, because that is where I was. EC2 proved to be much cheaper than physical servers. I also like the fact that I don't have to run to the datacenter anymore when there is an issue. I just file a ticket with Amazon.

rms 17y ago
OK, thanks for the clarification. I'm trying to find the post I read that gave me that idea but can't find it. Was it in in your AMA?
- jedberg 17y ago
  Could have been. Or possibly something Spez said.
  - rms 17y ago
    I thought it could have been a spez or kn0thing post but I went through all of them and couldn't find anything. I guess it could have been deleted, but I'm going to chalk this up to faulty memory on my part; you were there.