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Spending more money on AWS services than we'd spend hosting them ourselves, spending more time beating our head against insufficient documentation of proprietar

by gdulli 9y ago

Spending more money on AWS services than we'd spend hosting them ourselves, spending more time beating our head against insufficient documentation of proprietary Amazon services and wrappers compared to their corresponding open source technologies, spending more time debugging and on general uncertainty, spending more time waiting for responses from another company, having to stop what we're doing and handle backward incompatibility on Amazon's schedule instead of our own, spending more developer hours and fewer sysadmin hours on managing and debugging services instead of more sysadmin hours and fewer developer hours on our own services. (Developer hours are more costly and scarce.)

beams_of_light 9y ago
I hear the AWS argument quite a bit, but am not quite sure if the costs of AWS vs. independent infrastructure have been appropriately analyzed by the person making the accusation, in many cases. Independent infrastructure ages and requires updating as time goes on. Amazon normalizes those costs and provides the billed entity with semi-predictable costs on an ongoing basis. Keep in mind the costs of power, cooling, and bandwidth as well.
- lossolo 9y ago
  > I hear the AWS argument quite a bit, but am not quite sure if the costs of AWS vs. independent infrastructure have been appropriately analyzed by the person making the accusation, in many cases. I would pay around 8x times more if I would use AWS instead of dedicated servers. > in many cases. Independent infrastructure ages and requires updating as time goes on. That's why you use dedicated servers unless you are really huge (then you go with your hardware) or have specific requirements. In 99% other cases you use dedicated servers which are refreshed by data centers with newer hardware then you just switch (if you really need it...).
- falcolas 9y ago
  Good accountants can amortize the costs of servers (etc.) just as well as AWS can. > Keep in mind the costs of power, cooling, and bandwidth as well. And it will still probably be cheaper to host your own, with one caveat: if you have wildly varying traffic loads, AWS' autoscaling is hard to beat. The reality is, though, most companies don't have traffic loads which vary enough to justify the extra costs.
falcolas 9y ago
I'm seeing this too. We end up spending a lot of developer hours trying to figure out AWS specific quirks instead of just using generic and well proven open source tools. And this doesn't count the insane monthly AWS costs. "How do I authenticate a Github webhook in the API Gateway?" "How much should I provision for DynamoDB?" "Why is this IAM role not working?"

by gdulli 9y ago

beams_of_light 9y ago

I hear the AWS argument quite a bit, but am not quite sure if the costs of AWS vs. independent infrastructure have been appropriately analyzed by the person making the accusation, in many cases. Independent infrastructure ages and requires updating as time goes on. Amazon normalizes those costs and provides the billed entity with semi-predictable costs on an ongoing basis. Keep in mind the costs of power, cooling, and bandwidth as well.

lossolo 9y ago
> I hear the AWS argument quite a bit, but am not quite sure if the costs of AWS vs. independent infrastructure have been appropriately analyzed by the person making the accusation, in many cases. I would pay around 8x times more if I would use AWS instead of dedicated servers. > in many cases. Independent infrastructure ages and requires updating as time goes on. That's why you use dedicated servers unless you are really huge (then you go with your hardware) or have specific requirements. In 99% other cases you use dedicated servers which are refreshed by data centers with newer hardware then you just switch (if you really need it...).
falcolas 9y ago
Good accountants can amortize the costs of servers (etc.) just as well as AWS can. > Keep in mind the costs of power, cooling, and bandwidth as well. And it will still probably be cheaper to host your own, with one caveat: if you have wildly varying traffic loads, AWS' autoscaling is hard to beat. The reality is, though, most companies don't have traffic loads which vary enough to justify the extra costs.

falcolas 9y ago

I'm seeing this too. We end up spending a lot of developer hours trying to figure out AWS specific quirks instead of just using generic and well proven open source tools. And this doesn't count the insane monthly AWS costs. "How do I authenticate a Github webhook in the API Gateway?" "How much should I provision for DynamoDB?" "Why is this IAM role not working?"