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> 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

• 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.
  • takeda 10y ago
    > 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. The prices are lowered, but AWS is also continuously introducing new more powerful instance types and deprecates older ones. > 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. AWS has many solutions that are different than you are used to. For example there is no NFS (well there is EFS which supposed to be similar, but it's still in preview for at least a year now). You're forced to improvise, and use their solutions. Typically S3, which is not exactly 1:1 alternative to NFS, so you'll need to improvise and rework your applications to that model. If you want to move to something else, you no longer will have these services available. > Yes, you might have to rework some of your solutions, but it should be very doable. Exactly, that's what's pointed out. You'll have to rewrite your applications. There's no lock in that can't be solved by rewriting. The problem is that the rewrite might be quite expensive.
• ckozlowski 10y ago
  >My point is what you are describing for a small business person requires a tech person knowledgeable with AWS to implement It may seem that way, but in actuality, it really doesn't. In the case I described, their "tech" guy was someone who'd been pushed into the role by necessity. He had the most knowledge out of a body of people who didn't really make it their area of expertise, and became the IT guy as a result. He did a well enough job working on his own. But there's things he's going to miss, and it's a lot to keep up with if you want to run an infrastructure right. As you pointed out, it's a lot different running Software-as-a-service solution like Webmail vs. Infrastructure or Platform as a service. But that's the nice thing about AWS (and to be fair, Azure and Google do this quite well too) is that there's a solution for your tech level. If he were really knowledgeable and wanted to roll his own mail solution, he can, and stand up instances running sendmail and put in his own MX records into our DNS service and manage all of the bells and whistles. Or, he can use Workmail (or Gmail for business if you want to be agnostic) and point and click his way to getting mail set up. So there's a lot of range there, and the higher you go up the stack, the more management you hand off to the cloud provider at the (hopefully small) expense of control. But if the provider's offering fulfils all of your requirements, then it's a great deal for small, non-technical, shops who can offload their workloads into a provider who are experts at managing infrastructure, and you, the business owner, can create the occasional account and otherwise focus on business. There's a great chart on this you might have seen, but it looks something like this: http://1u88jj3r4db2x4txp44yqfj1.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/iaas-paas-saas.jpg http://1u88jj3r4db2x4txp44yqfj1.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-c... In any case, there's a solution for everyone depending on their skillset, and arguably, (in my humble yet biased opinion =P ) AWS has the best spread. If I had one self-criticism about us, it's that it's not always intuitive as to which of our services fall in the SAAS/PAAS/IAAS stack. Education will always be a challenge no matter who the provider is, and being that cloud is still relatively young, it's up to AWS, Microsoft, Google, and everyone else to explain just what "cloud" means and how to start with it. As for locked in, it’s AWS’ goal to keep you by ensuring you /want/ to use the service, not because you’re forced to be here. There’s no lock in other than transit fees. Which, if you have thousands of terabytes, can be hefty. That’s bandwidth for you. But there’s nothing proprietary. Take your code and data with you. I’ve seen engineers walk customers through the process of getting their stuff out. It happens. Not often, but it does, and we’ll help with that too.