5 ms·

Agreed - they are a great solution for small teams that are growing fast and don't have predictability. But, once you have some level of predictability and sca

Agreed - they are a great solution for small teams that are growing fast and don't have predictability. But, once you have some level of predictability and scale, it makes sense to move off to something much higher performance and lower cost. Until you become a decrepit Fortune 50 company and can't manage an IT department due to bloat, and it's cheaper to outsource.

rjsamson 11y ago
Curious what you see out there that's higher performance and lower cost than AWS? In my experience it's been a great fit for small apps all the way up to large complicated applications at scale - and once your infrastructure is large enough you're buying reserved instances anyway at anywhere between a 33% and 70% discount.
- vidarh 11y ago
  You can beat AWS on cost with pretty much any hosting provider (with some exceptions - e.g. Rackspace seems almost proud to be expensive). The 33% to 70% "discount" doesn't mean much when you then tie yourself into long term costs that are far more limiting than most manage hosting providers - so much for benefits of being able to scale up and down. What really kills you on AWS are the insane bandwidth prices. Buying bandwidth elsewhere is often so much cheaper than AWS that the difference in bandwidth costs alone more than finances the servers.
  - semerda 11y ago
    How is Netflix able to manage this so effectively and still serve ~30% of US traffic off AWS? I've heard the non-AWS folks talk of these vendor lock ins or long term costs but aren't those irrelevant in 2016+? eg. microservices to reduce the issue of vendor lock in and long term costs on infrastructure that goes out of date every 2-3 years is a poor planning indicator no?
    - noir_lord 11y ago
      I suspect Netflix is paying something a lot closer to AWS cost price than any of us will get. TBH The cost of AWS isn't what concerns me so much as the massive vendor lock-in.
      - grepory 11y ago
        Vendor lock-in is an unavoidable cost of doing business. Even if you build literally everything yourself, which you shouldn't, you still have resources, processes, apis, automation, expertise amassed around a specific set of operating constraints. Not only that, but if you invest significantly in any single technology, migrating to another technology is always going to be an extreme effort. Having led migrations from datacenters to AWS, AWS to Digital Ocean, RabbitMQ to NSQ to SNS+SQS, etc., I can say at this point that I do not believe in vendor lock-in as a legitimate reason to disqualify any particular solution.
    - vidarh 11y ago
      I can guarantee you that Netflix are not paying anything remotely like the advertised rates for EC2. I know first hand the kind of discounts some companies much, much smaller than Netflix can get, and they are steep. EC2 is still expensive then too, but if you pay, say, a million a year to Amazon without massive discounts, you've not done your job when negotiating. But yes, someone with the leverage Netflix has will be paying relatively reasonable rates for EC2 services. But pretty much nobody else has the leverage Netflix has. > I've heard the non-AWS folks talk of these vendor lock ins or long term costs but aren't those irrelevant in 2016+? Paying far above market rates is never going to be irrelevant, because if you pay above market and your competitor doesn't, chances are they'll have you for breakfast thanks to better margins. Why in the world would you agree to pay above market rates to get locked in for 1-3 years when you can pay less on a month-by-month contract?
      - secabeen 11y ago
        Netflix could even be paying less than cost, as a loss-leader for AWS.
      - 11y ago
- Spooky23 11y ago
  In my mind, it's like leasing a car. Leasing is better for your cash flow, but buying is usually a lower total cost. Outside of large volume S3, it's pretty trivial to beat AWS costs, assuming you have the human capability. S3 is a little different, as the capital investment required to host petabytes of data is very high, and Amazon's economy of scale is pretty compelling. For most anything else, dedicated boxes at a colo or your own datacenter should be cheaper, assuming you have the people around to do it, etc

rjsamson 11y ago

Curious what you see out there that's higher performance and lower cost than AWS? In my experience it's been a great fit for small apps all the way up to large complicated applications at scale - and once your infrastructure is large enough you're buying reserved instances anyway at anywhere between a 33% and 70% discount.

vidarh 11y ago
You can beat AWS on cost with pretty much any hosting provider (with some exceptions - e.g. Rackspace seems almost proud to be expensive). The 33% to 70% "discount" doesn't mean much when you then tie yourself into long term costs that are far more limiting than most manage hosting providers - so much for benefits of being able to scale up and down. What really kills you on AWS are the insane bandwidth prices. Buying bandwidth elsewhere is often so much cheaper than AWS that the difference in bandwidth costs alone more than finances the servers.
- semerda 11y ago
  How is Netflix able to manage this so effectively and still serve ~30% of US traffic off AWS? I've heard the non-AWS folks talk of these vendor lock ins or long term costs but aren't those irrelevant in 2016+? eg. microservices to reduce the issue of vendor lock in and long term costs on infrastructure that goes out of date every 2-3 years is a poor planning indicator no?
  - noir_lord 11y ago
    I suspect Netflix is paying something a lot closer to AWS cost price than any of us will get. TBH The cost of AWS isn't what concerns me so much as the massive vendor lock-in.
    - grepory 11y ago
      Vendor lock-in is an unavoidable cost of doing business. Even if you build literally everything yourself, which you shouldn't, you still have resources, processes, apis, automation, expertise amassed around a specific set of operating constraints. Not only that, but if you invest significantly in any single technology, migrating to another technology is always going to be an extreme effort. Having led migrations from datacenters to AWS, AWS to Digital Ocean, RabbitMQ to NSQ to SNS+SQS, etc., I can say at this point that I do not believe in vendor lock-in as a legitimate reason to disqualify any particular solution.
  - vidarh 11y ago
    I can guarantee you that Netflix are not paying anything remotely like the advertised rates for EC2. I know first hand the kind of discounts some companies much, much smaller than Netflix can get, and they are steep. EC2 is still expensive then too, but if you pay, say, a million a year to Amazon without massive discounts, you've not done your job when negotiating. But yes, someone with the leverage Netflix has will be paying relatively reasonable rates for EC2 services. But pretty much nobody else has the leverage Netflix has. > I've heard the non-AWS folks talk of these vendor lock ins or long term costs but aren't those irrelevant in 2016+? Paying far above market rates is never going to be irrelevant, because if you pay above market and your competitor doesn't, chances are they'll have you for breakfast thanks to better margins. Why in the world would you agree to pay above market rates to get locked in for 1-3 years when you can pay less on a month-by-month contract?
    - secabeen 11y ago
      Netflix could even be paying less than cost, as a loss-leader for AWS.
    - 11y ago
Spooky23 11y ago
In my mind, it's like leasing a car. Leasing is better for your cash flow, but buying is usually a lower total cost. Outside of large volume S3, it's pretty trivial to beat AWS costs, assuming you have the human capability. S3 is a little different, as the capital investment required to host petabytes of data is very high, and Amazon's economy of scale is pretty compelling. For most anything else, dedicated boxes at a colo or your own datacenter should be cheaper, assuming you have the people around to do it, etc