5 ms·

People using AWS are not typically, say, small business people looking to eke out savings however possible so they can take an extra vacation or buy an new car.

by gist 10y ago

People using AWS are not typically, say, small business people looking to eke out savings however possible so they can take an extra vacation or buy an new car. They are corporate people or people running startups using other people's money. Their success or failure doesn't depend on saving the organization money so they are willing to pay more to have less to worry about themselves personally.

ckozlowski 10y ago
Quite the opposite. If you're a small business in need of compute, then it's quite a value. I'll give you a case in point. I have a friend who works for a construction company. He has three servers he's cobbled together all at one site, and a NAS for storage. They provide email and document sharing, accounts management, etc. Every new blueprint that comes through needs to be reviewed for accuracy, but they come in as images, so he has another server that just runs tesseract OCR when he gets a pdf in. He asked me if he should get three servers, or one and virtualize the three. He wanted to plan for growth, but didn't know what that would be. the NAS was underutilized. He's buying no servers. He's setting up Workmail and Workdocs for their users. (Workspaces is an option in the future.) Blueprints are uploaded to S3 as they come in, where the file arrival notification triggers a lambda function that performs an OCR pass on the file and dumps it into a new bucket. Because this function runs on-demand, he avoids paying for a server to sit there, and only pays a few cents for a doc. His other services no longer run on servers he has to manage, so he doesn't worry about patching. He has reliable, off-site backups for the first time and version control, and he only pays for the exact amount of storage he's using as opposed to buying space for his NAS in advance. And he doesn't need to worry about scaling. That story plays out all the time. It's arguably a bigger savings for smaller people who can't afford the upfront costs than large corporations that already are likely to have massive sunk costs in datacenter space and assets. If you're a small business, the moment you go cloud you not only save money, but you gain capabilities (the biggest being in redundancy and reliability, which are the most important...how many small businesses have a DR/COOP capability on-prem?) which you would never have had otherwise.
- gist 10y ago
  > It's arguably a bigger savings for smaller people who can't afford the upfront costs Well first let me say that I have been doing all of this (as a business person who knows tech and Unix) for quite some time. And what you wrote above spins my head because I don't know much about AWS (but I can easily turn up a server if needed). My point is what you are describing for a small business person requires a tech person knowledgeable with AWS to implement (and keep on top of) which is the "cost" as opposed to perhaps saving money in this particular example for this particular customer. I am no doubting that AWS (which I see you work for in your profile) is good for certain types of uses (such as perhaps the example you are giving). But you still need a knowledgeable tech guy to keep it all working it is not like using webmail vs. running your own email server (imap, smtp etc.) Additionally once you are on AWS you are pretty much locked into AWS by the way (as you describe) things are setup. I am not convinced that at a time in the future AWS will not change their pricing to take advantage of the lock that they have (even though now they continually drop prices). Or add extra fees or whatever. Being in business so many years I have seen this happen and changing from AWS will be near impossible. (In other words for people on AWS such as you describe there is no easy alternative competition for a system once designed and specific to AWS in the way you detail).
  - MrMullen 10y ago
    > Additionally once you are on AWS you are pretty much locked into AWS by the way (as you describe) things are setup. I am not convinced that at a time in the future AWS will not change their pricing to take advantage of the lock that they have (even though now they continually drop prices). Or add extra fees or whatever. This is just FUD. AWS prices are always lowering, there is never a time they have increased. Even if they increased their prices, Google, Rackspace and Microsoft would eat their lunch. There is plenty of competition in the computing space. > Being in business so many years I have seen this happen and changing from AWS will be near impossible. (In other words for people on AWS such as you describe there is no easy alternative competition for a system once designed and specific to AWS in the way you detail). If your solutions are so narrowly defined that they won't run on anything else than AWS, then you are doing it wrong. You might run on specific AWS services, but there should be no reason why someone could not recreate their solutions over on Google Compute or other services. Yes, you might have to rework some of your solutions, but it should be very doable.
tracker1 10y ago
It really depends on your needs... if I can have my postgres/mysql, or other table storage serviced by another company without having to become intimately familiar with another set of software to administer and/or pay someone to do so it may be a good option. If you can save a FTE admin, you're saving at least $10K/month, that can cover the hosting and bandwidth for a pretty big site/software/service on AWS and the like.

by gist 10y ago

ckozlowski 10y ago

Quite the opposite. If you're a small business in need of compute, then it's quite a value. I'll give you a case in point. I have a friend who works for a construction company. He has three servers he's cobbled together all at one site, and a NAS for storage. They provide email and document sharing, accounts management, etc. Every new blueprint that comes through needs to be reviewed for accuracy, but they come in as images, so he has another server that just runs tesseract OCR when he gets a pdf in. He asked me if he should get three servers, or one and virtualize the three. He wanted to plan for growth, but didn't know what that would be. the NAS was underutilized. He's buying no servers. He's setting up Workmail and Workdocs for their users. (Workspaces is an option in the future.) Blueprints are uploaded to S3 as they come in, where the file arrival notification triggers a lambda function that performs an OCR pass on the file and dumps it into a new bucket. Because this function runs on-demand, he avoids paying for a server to sit there, and only pays a few cents for a doc. His other services no longer run on servers he has to manage, so he doesn't worry about patching. He has reliable, off-site backups for the first time and version control, and he only pays for the exact amount of storage he's using as opposed to buying space for his NAS in advance. And he doesn't need to worry about scaling. That story plays out all the time. It's arguably a bigger savings for smaller people who can't afford the upfront costs than large corporations that already are likely to have massive sunk costs in datacenter space and assets. If you're a small business, the moment you go cloud you not only save money, but you gain capabilities (the biggest being in redundancy and reliability, which are the most important...how many small businesses have a DR/COOP capability on-prem?) which you would never have had otherwise.

gist 10y ago
> It's arguably a bigger savings for smaller people who can't afford the upfront costs Well first let me say that I have been doing all of this (as a business person who knows tech and Unix) for quite some time. And what you wrote above spins my head because I don't know much about AWS (but I can easily turn up a server if needed). My point is what you are describing for a small business person requires a tech person knowledgeable with AWS to implement (and keep on top of) which is the "cost" as opposed to perhaps saving money in this particular example for this particular customer. I am no doubting that AWS (which I see you work for in your profile) is good for certain types of uses (such as perhaps the example you are giving). But you still need a knowledgeable tech guy to keep it all working it is not like using webmail vs. running your own email server (imap, smtp etc.) Additionally once you are on AWS you are pretty much locked into AWS by the way (as you describe) things are setup. I am not convinced that at a time in the future AWS will not change their pricing to take advantage of the lock that they have (even though now they continually drop prices). Or add extra fees or whatever. Being in business so many years I have seen this happen and changing from AWS will be near impossible. (In other words for people on AWS such as you describe there is no easy alternative competition for a system once designed and specific to AWS in the way you detail).
- MrMullen 10y ago
  > Additionally once you are on AWS you are pretty much locked into AWS by the way (as you describe) things are setup. I am not convinced that at a time in the future AWS will not change their pricing to take advantage of the lock that they have (even though now they continually drop prices). Or add extra fees or whatever. This is just FUD. AWS prices are always lowering, there is never a time they have increased. Even if they increased their prices, Google, Rackspace and Microsoft would eat their lunch. There is plenty of competition in the computing space. > Being in business so many years I have seen this happen and changing from AWS will be near impossible. (In other words for people on AWS such as you describe there is no easy alternative competition for a system once designed and specific to AWS in the way you detail). If your solutions are so narrowly defined that they won't run on anything else than AWS, then you are doing it wrong. You might run on specific AWS services, but there should be no reason why someone could not recreate their solutions over on Google Compute or other services. Yes, you might have to rework some of your solutions, but it should be very doable.

tracker1 10y ago

It really depends on your needs... if I can have my postgres/mysql, or other table storage serviced by another company without having to become intimately familiar with another set of software to administer and/or pay someone to do so it may be a good option. If you can save a FTE admin, you're saving at least $10K/month, that can cover the hosting and bandwidth for a pretty big site/software/service on AWS and the like.