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If you're big and are a typical company bad at IT, AWS is a massive cost savings. Most HN readers probably aren't very familiar with the costing and the line it

If you're big and are a typical company bad at IT, AWS is a massive cost savings. Most HN readers probably aren't very familiar with the costing and the line item levels of bureaucracy in Fortune 500 enterprise IT that makes AWS bills of $200k / mo for maybe 10 lightweight websites (< 200k http requests / mo) on an intranet look like a stupid cheap bargain. Maybe the oldest crowds do, but past customers of mine have readily paid $5 MM / month for basically a couple Wordpress sites that are on 24/7 deathwatch by human eyes constantly because they've failed to ever get basic monitoring working or it's cheaper to have a human watch than to pay for resources that properly monitor the site for outages and simply reboot. The places that deploy and operate applications (and their infrastructure) like it's 1994 dominate much of the Fortune 100, federal, and state governments. For every hip project with containers and configuration management there's 20 legacy applications operated with legacy methods. These companies want to buy software to throw over the fence to the same people and processes because they've invested decades in their creation and innovation / eliminating waste is so damn difficult in such a culture.

Spooky23 10y ago
I don't see how a company terrible at managing IT will magically improve with AWS. Maybe they won't get killed as badly by EMC and shift wastage to various AWS services. I'm not knocking Amazon -- just saying that you can deliver most enterprise workloads cheaper.
- azernik 10y ago
  Because they will be outsourcing a big chunk of that work they do inefficiently (backups, monitoring, provisioning, etc.) to Amazon, which is much better at it. Hence the proliferation of things like hosted AWS Outlook system [1]. Anyone in our Bay Area bubble of efficient IT would say keeping that running for a 2,000-user business is probably... what, a half of a full-time-equivalent of workload, averaged over long periods of time? Less? But Amazon can charge $4/user/month (in this hypothetical company that's round about $100K/year) and it is totally a steal, because a lot of companies will not be able to keep it running it anywhere near that budget. And that is the market they're going for - note that the free trial is 25 users. This is not a product for the small company that just doesn't have the capital to invest in their homegrown solution - that's Google Apps for Work. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/workmail/ https://aws.amazon.com/workmail/
  - mseebach 10y ago
    Never mind that $100k is probably reasonably close to what you'll be paying your IT guy in the Bay Area anyway, and the Amazon service is 24/7, probably better than even the best person you could hire, and never even reads the Google recruiter emails. And that's just pure cost. If you're in the Bay Area bubble, you probably have much more valuable things for your systems guys to work on. Point being, even for a Bay Area company, even at twice the pure cost of personnel, this looks like a pretty good deal.
- devonkim 10y ago
  Enterprises are abominably bad at IT as a rule and horrifically inefficient partly because they have made terrible decisions they are stuck with for decades or longer. The raw costs they pay to bloodsucking contractors that are nickel and dimed year after year is systemic, for example. Are you familiar with DoD contract price structuring by chance? Furthermore, are you aware of how desperate people are to deploy software onto something like AWS? There's a lot of reasons why the AWS office is in Virginia and is at least 50%+ security engineering in background. Trying to secure enterprise applications on-premise with the tools of the 90s is frustrating and typically an exercise in massive time wasting when most companies didn't even think about automation of work because the money was pouring in so much. The amusing irony of this all is that IT is a cost center typically yet by trying to cut costs you wind up costing yourself so much over time.

Spooky23 10y ago

I don't see how a company terrible at managing IT will magically improve with AWS. Maybe they won't get killed as badly by EMC and shift wastage to various AWS services. I'm not knocking Amazon -- just saying that you can deliver most enterprise workloads cheaper.

azernik 10y ago
Because they will be outsourcing a big chunk of that work they do inefficiently (backups, monitoring, provisioning, etc.) to Amazon, which is much better at it. Hence the proliferation of things like hosted AWS Outlook system [1]. Anyone in our Bay Area bubble of efficient IT would say keeping that running for a 2,000-user business is probably... what, a half of a full-time-equivalent of workload, averaged over long periods of time? Less? But Amazon can charge $4/user/month (in this hypothetical company that's round about $100K/year) and it is totally a steal, because a lot of companies will not be able to keep it running it anywhere near that budget. And that is the market they're going for - note that the free trial is 25 users. This is not a product for the small company that just doesn't have the capital to invest in their homegrown solution - that's Google Apps for Work. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/workmail/ https://aws.amazon.com/workmail/
- mseebach 10y ago
  Never mind that $100k is probably reasonably close to what you'll be paying your IT guy in the Bay Area anyway, and the Amazon service is 24/7, probably better than even the best person you could hire, and never even reads the Google recruiter emails. And that's just pure cost. If you're in the Bay Area bubble, you probably have much more valuable things for your systems guys to work on. Point being, even for a Bay Area company, even at twice the pure cost of personnel, this looks like a pretty good deal.
devonkim 10y ago
Enterprises are abominably bad at IT as a rule and horrifically inefficient partly because they have made terrible decisions they are stuck with for decades or longer. The raw costs they pay to bloodsucking contractors that are nickel and dimed year after year is systemic, for example. Are you familiar with DoD contract price structuring by chance? Furthermore, are you aware of how desperate people are to deploy software onto something like AWS? There's a lot of reasons why the AWS office is in Virginia and is at least 50%+ security engineering in background. Trying to secure enterprise applications on-premise with the tools of the 90s is frustrating and typically an exercise in massive time wasting when most companies didn't even think about automation of work because the money was pouring in so much. The amusing irony of this all is that IT is a cost center typically yet by trying to cut costs you wind up costing yourself so much over time.