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Sure, that's an argument that I'm sure crosses the threshold sometimes. However, with the amount of money we're paying AWS, we could've easily brought on severa

Sure, that's an argument that I'm sure crosses the threshold sometimes. However, with the amount of money we're paying AWS, we could've easily brought on several new full-time, dedicated guys to handle datacenter, hardware, colo, and sysadmin stuff and still come out ahead. AWS is very expensive. People underestimate how expensive it is. I don't preclude the possibility that it's cost-effective for someone out there, but I seriously doubt that's the case for most of its users.

pjlegato 11y ago
AWS is much like renting a car. If you only need a car for a week out of the year, you're much better off renting one rather than buying one and leaving it idle for 51 weeks. But if you know you'll need a car every day, it's much cheaper to buy or long-term lease one rather than rent at the daily rate. AWS is the daily-rate car rental. It's great when you have 1) highly variable load, and 2) your entire infrastructure is instrumented to scale up and down quickly with minimal manual intervention. If, for example, you are running a large e-commerce site -- the case it was designed for -- AWS is great. Your load will be average most of the year, then go up a lot for Christmas shopping in November, then go up even more in December... then load goes back down to average for the remaining 10 months. Part of the issue is also cultural. Younger developers who grew up hearing "cloud is awesome" every day think the very idea of colocating hardware is archaic and ridiculous, and won't even consider it.
- cookiecaper 11y ago
  Yeah, I agree with you. A good rollout would use bare-metal base hardware and scalable on-demand instances that can be auto-spawned and auto-decommissioned in the cloud. However, I agree that the node.js generation is coming up believing that cloud is implicitly superior. Really I think this is a reaction to the fact that they don't know anything about system administration, either software or hardware, and they're trying to cover that up by claiming that anyone who uses real hardware is behind the times (in fact, they've even taken it to the extreme that anyone who uses a real server-side language is behind the times). It'd be great if we had more understanding of the marketing and political efforts in the tech world and had an entity that tried to counteract some of these fads before they got out of control. node.js itself would be a good target for such an entity.
sokoloff 11y ago
Bringing on more people has additional hidden costs as well. HR, payroll, benefits/401K, management, staffing an on-call rotation for hardware issues (you still have to staff software on-call in either case), dealing with vacations, sickness, training, etc. It's surprisingly expensive to run a full complement of web-facing IT services. Amazon (and Azure/GCE/RS/others) just make that calculus more explicit and in your face. (I also acknowledge that they are running AWS as a profitable and profit-seeking enterprise, so yes, they are marking things up beyond the lowest possible cost.) For us, AWS is absolutely more expensive on a headline number basis. It's also decreased our latency of prod delivery and increased our agility as compared to on-prem solutions. We can get products in front of customers in hours/days that used to take weeks/months.
- cookiecaper 11y ago
  >Bringing on more people has additional hidden costs as well. I'm including those costs in my estimation of how many people we could hire and still save money over using AWS. It's still several.
nasalgoat 11y ago
When our CEO told me we were moving to "the cloud," no amount of financial or technical explanation would convince him. It was entirely about chasing VC dollars and converting CAPEX into OPEX. VCs hate CAPEX, and previous fundraising rounds at our previous venture highlighted our large CAPEX due to millions of dollars of physical hardware as a major turnoff. So, I retired perfectly good 3-year-old servers that were fully amortized and replaced them with 4x as many instances, and brought up our monthly infrastructure spend by 10X. 10X! But at least now the VCs are happy.

pjlegato 11y ago

AWS is much like renting a car. If you only need a car for a week out of the year, you're much better off renting one rather than buying one and leaving it idle for 51 weeks. But if you know you'll need a car every day, it's much cheaper to buy or long-term lease one rather than rent at the daily rate. AWS is the daily-rate car rental. It's great when you have 1) highly variable load, and 2) your entire infrastructure is instrumented to scale up and down quickly with minimal manual intervention. If, for example, you are running a large e-commerce site -- the case it was designed for -- AWS is great. Your load will be average most of the year, then go up a lot for Christmas shopping in November, then go up even more in December... then load goes back down to average for the remaining 10 months. Part of the issue is also cultural. Younger developers who grew up hearing "cloud is awesome" every day think the very idea of colocating hardware is archaic and ridiculous, and won't even consider it.

cookiecaper 11y ago
Yeah, I agree with you. A good rollout would use bare-metal base hardware and scalable on-demand instances that can be auto-spawned and auto-decommissioned in the cloud. However, I agree that the node.js generation is coming up believing that cloud is implicitly superior. Really I think this is a reaction to the fact that they don't know anything about system administration, either software or hardware, and they're trying to cover that up by claiming that anyone who uses real hardware is behind the times (in fact, they've even taken it to the extreme that anyone who uses a real server-side language is behind the times). It'd be great if we had more understanding of the marketing and political efforts in the tech world and had an entity that tried to counteract some of these fads before they got out of control. node.js itself would be a good target for such an entity.

sokoloff 11y ago

Bringing on more people has additional hidden costs as well. HR, payroll, benefits/401K, management, staffing an on-call rotation for hardware issues (you still have to staff software on-call in either case), dealing with vacations, sickness, training, etc. It's surprisingly expensive to run a full complement of web-facing IT services. Amazon (and Azure/GCE/RS/others) just make that calculus more explicit and in your face. (I also acknowledge that they are running AWS as a profitable and profit-seeking enterprise, so yes, they are marking things up beyond the lowest possible cost.) For us, AWS is absolutely more expensive on a headline number basis. It's also decreased our latency of prod delivery and increased our agility as compared to on-prem solutions. We can get products in front of customers in hours/days that used to take weeks/months.

cookiecaper 11y ago
>Bringing on more people has additional hidden costs as well. I'm including those costs in my estimation of how many people we could hire and still save money over using AWS. It's still several.

nasalgoat 11y ago

When our CEO told me we were moving to "the cloud," no amount of financial or technical explanation would convince him. It was entirely about chasing VC dollars and converting CAPEX into OPEX. VCs hate CAPEX, and previous fundraising rounds at our previous venture highlighted our large CAPEX due to millions of dollars of physical hardware as a major turnoff. So, I retired perfectly good 3-year-old servers that were fully amortized and replaced them with 4x as many instances, and brought up our monthly infrastructure spend by 10X. 10X! But at least now the VCs are happy.