4 ms·

Guess Evernote are prepping for a sale/IPO? Moving into the cloud at this stage doesn't make any sense otherwise.

StreamBright 10y ago
Why would it not make any sense? They probably did an analysis on this and decided that GCP overall is a better solution to their problem. I regularly move companies to the cloud because they cannot afford to setup their on services and just want to focus on the business side of tech and write software only that delivers business value. These companies tend to use queue services, CDNs, scalable file stores, clustered database servers, disposable environments for research. If they had to operate these services, it would be a horrendous cost and huge amount of effort to set this all up and keep it running. Cloud vendors to these things for a reasonable price and it is ready to be used today. I find it very hard to think of any scenario where cloud does not win the game, this is why Google and Microsoft is betting on it.
- disiplus 10y ago
  i run my own "cloud" on rented bare metal, i have to be mad according to people like you.
- vidarh 10y ago
  I regularly move people off cloud providers once they realise how expensive they are. We usually cut peoples fully loaded costs in two or more by moving them to dedicated hosting. Far more if they're bandwidth intensive (Google and AWS charge in the region of 5x to 50x as much for bandwidth as most other hosting alternatives) There is certainly segments that use a lot of disposable environments and complex services where it makes sense to go to cloud providers, but I've yet to see a client where it came out as the cheapr option. If they're big enough to negotiate steep discounts, then that certainly changes - I know one company that has 75% discounts over the public prices from one of the major cloud providers, and they're not that large (yearly spend in the high six digits).
  - StreamBright 10y ago
    How would you move an S3 user off cloud? Do you have networking, load-balancing and performance experts on call if something goes sideways? I guess we are aiming for different companies, my clients want scalability and do not want to deal with BGP issues, power outages, vendor RMAs and the other things people forget to add to the basket when comparing cloud vendors to dedicated hosting. Amazon buys networking equipment and servers on a discount you would not able to buy, they also get a great discount for the networking bandwidth and energy as well. It would be very hard to beat them in the datacenter game. I worked for companies where we were in charge of datacenters (I have built few) and companies using cloud services. Based on my experience you cannot meet with the reliability, security, availability and efficiency of AWS/GCP when using a small dedicated hosting provider.
    - vidarh 10y ago
      > How would you move an S3 user off cloud? Do you have networking, load-balancing and performance experts on call if something goes sideways? The vast majority of S3 users have loads that can be handled with a couple of low end dedicated servers. If you can afford to pay the S3 bandwidth charges, then by the time you can't serve the load with a handful of servers, you're paying so much that you can afford hefty retainers with consulting/devops companies larger than mine and still make massive savings. S3 can be cost effective, but only if you rarely retrieve the data. > I guess we are aiming for different companies, my clients want scalability and do not want to deal with BGP issues, power outages, vendor RMAs and the other things people forget to add to the basket when comparing cloud vendors to dedicated hosting. Same with my customers, which is why they pay me to set up and operate systems for them. Still ends up far cheaper than cloud setups. > Amazon buys networking equipment and servers on a discount you would not able to buy, they also get a great discount for the networking bandwidth and energy as well. I'm sure they do, the problem is they're not passing those savings on. Especially on bandwidth. As an example, S3 bandwidth out for up to 10TB/month is $90 per TB. I pay ~$2 per TB for most of my own projects. Depending client needs we use providers that charge from ~$2/TB to $20/TB. It sounds to me as if you've not actually looked at prices at alternative providers.
  - 10y ago
- inthewoods 10y ago
  You also have to take into account the number of people it takes to run the data center operations in looking at the total costs. If they had 20 people required to operate running their own servers, that's probably around $2m/year in personnel costs, whereas they might be able to reduce that to, say, 5 people and save $1.5m just on that.

Why would it not make any sense? They probably did an analysis on this and decided that GCP overall is a better solution to their problem. I regularly move companies to the cloud because they cannot afford to setup their on services and just want to focus on the business side of tech and write software only that delivers business value. These companies tend to use queue services, CDNs, scalable file stores, clustered database servers, disposable environments for research. If they had to operate these services, it would be a horrendous cost and huge amount of effort to set this all up and keep it running. Cloud vendors to these things for a reasonable price and it is ready to be used today. I find it very hard to think of any scenario where cloud does not win the game, this is why Google and Microsoft is betting on it.

disiplus 10y ago
i run my own "cloud" on rented bare metal, i have to be mad according to people like you.
vidarh 10y ago
I regularly move people off cloud providers once they realise how expensive they are. We usually cut peoples fully loaded costs in two or more by moving them to dedicated hosting. Far more if they're bandwidth intensive (Google and AWS charge in the region of 5x to 50x as much for bandwidth as most other hosting alternatives) There is certainly segments that use a lot of disposable environments and complex services where it makes sense to go to cloud providers, but I've yet to see a client where it came out as the cheapr option. If they're big enough to negotiate steep discounts, then that certainly changes - I know one company that has 75% discounts over the public prices from one of the major cloud providers, and they're not that large (yearly spend in the high six digits).
- StreamBright 10y ago
  How would you move an S3 user off cloud? Do you have networking, load-balancing and performance experts on call if something goes sideways? I guess we are aiming for different companies, my clients want scalability and do not want to deal with BGP issues, power outages, vendor RMAs and the other things people forget to add to the basket when comparing cloud vendors to dedicated hosting. Amazon buys networking equipment and servers on a discount you would not able to buy, they also get a great discount for the networking bandwidth and energy as well. It would be very hard to beat them in the datacenter game. I worked for companies where we were in charge of datacenters (I have built few) and companies using cloud services. Based on my experience you cannot meet with the reliability, security, availability and efficiency of AWS/GCP when using a small dedicated hosting provider.
  - vidarh 10y ago
    > How would you move an S3 user off cloud? Do you have networking, load-balancing and performance experts on call if something goes sideways? The vast majority of S3 users have loads that can be handled with a couple of low end dedicated servers. If you can afford to pay the S3 bandwidth charges, then by the time you can't serve the load with a handful of servers, you're paying so much that you can afford hefty retainers with consulting/devops companies larger than mine and still make massive savings. S3 can be cost effective, but only if you rarely retrieve the data. > I guess we are aiming for different companies, my clients want scalability and do not want to deal with BGP issues, power outages, vendor RMAs and the other things people forget to add to the basket when comparing cloud vendors to dedicated hosting. Same with my customers, which is why they pay me to set up and operate systems for them. Still ends up far cheaper than cloud setups. > Amazon buys networking equipment and servers on a discount you would not able to buy, they also get a great discount for the networking bandwidth and energy as well. I'm sure they do, the problem is they're not passing those savings on. Especially on bandwidth. As an example, S3 bandwidth out for up to 10TB/month is $90 per TB. I pay ~$2 per TB for most of my own projects. Depending client needs we use providers that charge from ~$2/TB to $20/TB. It sounds to me as if you've not actually looked at prices at alternative providers.
- 10y ago
inthewoods 10y ago
You also have to take into account the number of people it takes to run the data center operations in looking at the total costs. If they had 20 people required to operate running their own servers, that's probably around $2m/year in personnel costs, whereas they might be able to reduce that to, say, 5 people and save $1.5m just on that.