4 ms·

> Not at all. Most customers couldn't care less about money. you're out of your mind. customers at the high end care MORE about money, not less. the company

> Not at all. Most customers couldn't care less about money. you're out of your mind. customers at the high end care MORE about money, not less. the company spending $1 million/month on AWS is desperately looking for ways out. DESPERATELY. their entire business is being held hostage by amazon. jeff bezos has them by the balls and is squeezing harder and harder by the day. they have hired consultants to do the analysis, they have hired operations VPs to get them out, but they are failing. they are failing, and shoveling even more money to AWS every week, or their business goes dark. they are doing this because one side of their business (doing stuff) is outpacing their intelligence on the other side (paying for infrastructure to do stuff). this is the genius of amazon. this is why they are successful. amazon can arbitrage this opportunity better than anyone else currently. how do i know? i compete with amazon and talk to customers on a weekly basis. they are desperate. they woke up one day and are are now sending their entire profit margin to jeff bezos. every single CFO is thinking about it. how panicked are they? you could cut their bill in half and they still wouldn't do it. they're scared, like a deer in the headlights. they don't know what to do. what if they make a wrong decision? ohhhhh my goddddddddd but... let's do nothing and keep our jobs. that's the reality. meanwhile, s3 can go down for half a day, and amazon doesn't even really have to acknowledge it. becuase what are the customers going to do? MOVE? LOL! you might as well ask them to build a time machine. that is real. people live in that reality. sometimes against their will. people care about costs, and try hard, and all of those nice things, but they will soon be losers because jeff bezos is just BETTER at business than they are. jeff bezos is literally being paid by the people he is about to put out of business at the application level, and they're happy to pay him to do it. it's amazing. it truly is. here's the problem: more people know how to click a button on console.aws.amazon.com than to migrate and operate an entire site. people simply do not have the skills. they just don't. they don't know how the internet actually works, but they're operating a business on the internet. they're dumb. amazon capitalized on that, good for them. maybe the era where needing to actually knowing how the internet works is over. i don't know.

Spooky23 10y ago
If they're spending $1M/week, what do they expect to spend on their own? If you're too dumb to manage costs on AWS, the answer is "we have no clue".
- iamacynic 10y ago
  a competitor that charges literally 75% less. except they won't do it, because they are SCARED out of their MINDS.
  - ximeng 10y ago
    Scared by what?
    - iamacynic 10y ago
      change.
  - user5994461 10y ago
    Charging less... but for what service? ;) AWS is providing a service, not a price number.
013a 10y ago
I agree. This is definitely the impression I've gotten from people I've talked to. In an ideal world, how would they solve this? Is it to move back to self-hosted infrastructure? Isn't that the same problem; they're just hostage to their own employees and capex instead of Amazon?
- tgjsrkghruksd 10y ago
  Am I being a hopeless romantic to imagine that barons of days yore used to actually think owning the capital and employing the labor with which they went about their business made them powerful? Who is holding who hostage? Not everyone is an SV technoweenie too young to remember when the dot-com crash was a thing.
- user5994461 10y ago
  In the real world, you sell a product that is profitable enough to cover the costs. Do you think a company that sells t-shirt for less than the fabric cost will live long? Nope. Do you think a company can get equivalent service to AWS for much less money? Nope. Well, actually, yes, there is google cloud that's half the price. https://thehftguy.com/2016/11/18/google-cloud-is-50-cheaper-than-aws/ https://thehftguy.com/2016/11/18/google-cloud-is-50-cheaper-...
koverstreet 10y ago
Just curious who you work for and if you're hiring? Sounds like exactly the kind of thing I'd like to be doing.
- iamacynic 10y ago
  what's stopping you?
  - koverstreet 10y ago
    Not really up to bootstrapping a startup myself at this point in time :)
inferiorhuman 10y ago
> customers at the high end care MORE about money, not less. the company spending $1 million/month on AWS is desperately looking for ways out. Our monthly AWS spend was six or seven figures. We were ostensibly looking for ways to both move to and from AWS, but we were hardly desperate. It turns out running data centers is HARD and it simply wasn't our core competency. If you're not profitable with AWS you're probably not going to be profitable moving to your own data center (or racks within a data center).
- iamacynic 10y ago
  who says you have to run a DC if you're not on aws? did i say that, or did you project that onto me? how about hiring a smaller company that can do it for you, for half the cost? i know why not, because you think they're going to fuck it all up, get you fired, and you'll be homeless and ashamed. and so back to amazon you go. false dichotomy.
  - inferiorhuman 10y ago
    > who says you have to run a DC if you're not on aws? did i say that, or did you project that onto me? I didn't. In fact I even suggested that moving away from AWS wouldn't make sense even if you only needed a few racks. Less than that and it makes even less financial sense to self-host unless you've got really compelling compliance issues. > how about hiring a smaller company that can do it for you, for half the cost? Well... > i know why not, because you think they're going to fuck it all up, get you fired, and you'll be homeless and ashamed. and so back to amazon you go. I was going to say that a lot of the inertia with AWS is due to feeling like we get a good value and at that size decent support. From what I can tell I either worked for a very anomalous company or you're mostly grasping at straws. A few things though: - No, I wouldn't worry about being fired for choosing a vendor that didn't pan out. Short of committing a felony that would reflect poorly on the company admin action wasn't even a possibility. Large companies move very, very slowly (if at all). - No, we're not desperately looking for alternatives to AWS. There's some unhappiness with cost, but mostly that's a capex vs opex go fellate the corporate radiers kinda thing and less of an actually saving money kinda thing. - No, you're not going to save us 75%, 50%, or likely even 30%. We had enough cruft in our AWS stuff alone that culling 10-25% (depending on the product) was relatively painless. - No, we don't feel like we're getting ripped off. At that kind of monthly spend you get plenty of attention from Amazon. And not the used-car-salesman kind of attention. Ultimately, at that scale, few decisions were made because they'd save money up front which seems like your main selling point. As an example from the hardware side: there's a reason why vendors like Cisco and Juniper still do very well in the enterprise environment and vendors like Ubiquiti and MikroTik don't (despite the latter offering 10GBE equipment for under $200).
user5994461 10y ago
Use google cloud if you care about money so much, it's half the costs of AWS. If a company is running a product that is not profitable, it's a business problem on their side, not on AWS. Having your own infrastructure is not cheaper than having AWS so that's not gonna save you either.

Spooky23 10y ago

If they're spending $1M/week, what do they expect to spend on their own? If you're too dumb to manage costs on AWS, the answer is "we have no clue".

iamacynic 10y ago
a competitor that charges literally 75% less. except they won't do it, because they are SCARED out of their MINDS.
- ximeng 10y ago
  Scared by what?
  - iamacynic 10y ago
    change.
- user5994461 10y ago
  Charging less... but for what service? ;) AWS is providing a service, not a price number.

013a 10y ago

I agree. This is definitely the impression I've gotten from people I've talked to. In an ideal world, how would they solve this? Is it to move back to self-hosted infrastructure? Isn't that the same problem; they're just hostage to their own employees and capex instead of Amazon?

tgjsrkghruksd 10y ago
Am I being a hopeless romantic to imagine that barons of days yore used to actually think owning the capital and employing the labor with which they went about their business made them powerful? Who is holding who hostage? Not everyone is an SV technoweenie too young to remember when the dot-com crash was a thing.
user5994461 10y ago
In the real world, you sell a product that is profitable enough to cover the costs. Do you think a company that sells t-shirt for less than the fabric cost will live long? Nope. Do you think a company can get equivalent service to AWS for much less money? Nope. Well, actually, yes, there is google cloud that's half the price. https://thehftguy.com/2016/11/18/google-cloud-is-50-cheaper-than-aws/ https://thehftguy.com/2016/11/18/google-cloud-is-50-cheaper-...

koverstreet 10y ago

Just curious who you work for and if you're hiring? Sounds like exactly the kind of thing I'd like to be doing.

iamacynic 10y ago
what's stopping you?
- koverstreet 10y ago
  Not really up to bootstrapping a startup myself at this point in time :)

inferiorhuman 10y ago

> customers at the high end care MORE about money, not less. the company spending $1 million/month on AWS is desperately looking for ways out. Our monthly AWS spend was six or seven figures. We were ostensibly looking for ways to both move to and from AWS, but we were hardly desperate. It turns out running data centers is HARD and it simply wasn't our core competency. If you're not profitable with AWS you're probably not going to be profitable moving to your own data center (or racks within a data center).

iamacynic 10y ago
who says you have to run a DC if you're not on aws? did i say that, or did you project that onto me? how about hiring a smaller company that can do it for you, for half the cost? i know why not, because you think they're going to fuck it all up, get you fired, and you'll be homeless and ashamed. and so back to amazon you go. false dichotomy.
- inferiorhuman 10y ago
  > who says you have to run a DC if you're not on aws? did i say that, or did you project that onto me? I didn't. In fact I even suggested that moving away from AWS wouldn't make sense even if you only needed a few racks. Less than that and it makes even less financial sense to self-host unless you've got really compelling compliance issues. > how about hiring a smaller company that can do it for you, for half the cost? Well... > i know why not, because you think they're going to fuck it all up, get you fired, and you'll be homeless and ashamed. and so back to amazon you go. I was going to say that a lot of the inertia with AWS is due to feeling like we get a good value and at that size decent support. From what I can tell I either worked for a very anomalous company or you're mostly grasping at straws. A few things though: - No, I wouldn't worry about being fired for choosing a vendor that didn't pan out. Short of committing a felony that would reflect poorly on the company admin action wasn't even a possibility. Large companies move very, very slowly (if at all). - No, we're not desperately looking for alternatives to AWS. There's some unhappiness with cost, but mostly that's a capex vs opex go fellate the corporate radiers kinda thing and less of an actually saving money kinda thing. - No, you're not going to save us 75%, 50%, or likely even 30%. We had enough cruft in our AWS stuff alone that culling 10-25% (depending on the product) was relatively painless. - No, we don't feel like we're getting ripped off. At that kind of monthly spend you get plenty of attention from Amazon. And not the used-car-salesman kind of attention. Ultimately, at that scale, few decisions were made because they'd save money up front which seems like your main selling point. As an example from the hardware side: there's a reason why vendors like Cisco and Juniper still do very well in the enterprise environment and vendors like Ubiquiti and MikroTik don't (despite the latter offering 10GBE equipment for under $200).

user5994461 10y ago

Use google cloud if you care about money so much, it's half the costs of AWS. If a company is running a product that is not profitable, it's a business problem on their side, not on AWS. Having your own infrastructure is not cheaper than having AWS so that's not gonna save you either.