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The hardware and bandwidth costs are only small parts of the full cost of running your own infrastructure. There are so many other benefits: - you don't have t

The hardware and bandwidth costs are only small parts of the full cost of running your own infrastructure. There are so many other benefits: - you don't have to support your own low level services like Pub/Sub, Cloud Storage, Spanner, etc. - you don't have to worry as much about things like HIPAA compliance - developers don't have to wait for you to allocate more hardware, greatly slowing down the software development process - it's much easier to test your applications, since you can spin up a full copy using rented infrastructure, and then throw it all away once your tests are complete - many other benefits that I'm forgetting And of course if you buy enough from them, you do get additional discounts. For many (most? I don't have data) companies, the actual cost of the infrastructure and bandwidth itself is tiny compared to all the other "hidden costs".

deleted 9y ago
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ShakataGaNai 9y ago
So having experienced Ops in both cloud and non cloud companies. A few rebuttals: - Bandwidth is VERY expensive in AWS compared to what you can buy in Datacenters. A 1 GBPS connection is so "cheap" you can get it and a 42U rack at HE.net for $400/mo ( http://he.net/colocation.html http://he.net/colocation.html ). That same 1GBPS is roughly 300TB/month. Assuming it's all outbound - that's roughly $21k in AWS. So bandwidth is a small cost IF you're not moving large amounts of data out of AWS. If you stream media - it can be a HUGE portion of your bill. - HIPAA Compliance - That and other compliance aspects assumes that you need those compliance frameworks. In enterprise world that might be the case (SOC2 and ISO27k1 are very common requirements for Enterprise SaaS clients). However in the B2C? Users don't care. - Waiting for hardware allocation. Once you get to a certain size you have hardware spare, typically. Developers can use that for their tests. You can also have your datacenter/operations group work with your developers during project planning so the code and HW can be ready at the same time. That being said, I don't disagree there are advantages to the cloud. I'm AWS certified, I drink the coolaid. But saying that there are "so many other benefits" is ignoring the fact that there are "so many benefits" to on prem too. There are pro's and cons to both sides.
- chaostheory 9y ago
  > Waiting for hardware allocation. Once you get to a certain size you have hardware spare Requisitions for non-cloud server resources can takes hours, days, and in some places weeks; even when there is availability depending on the org. At best it takes close to an hour compared to a few seconds in the cloud via a web dashboard.
  - toomuchtodo 9y ago
    You can use virtualization on prem; it’s trivial. No one is still racking hardware on demand. Don’t want to use Xen or KVM? Kubernetes is your solution if you’re a containers shop. On prem delivery/provisioning is not slower when executed properly.
    - chaostheory 9y ago
      Could be wrong but I don't think virtualization or container technology is the blocker. It's the software that keeps track of who's allowed to use it and who's currently using it that's the problem. With AWS it's easy, because you pay money for the privilege. It's harder for large orgs, when divisions and teams don't directly pay to access servers. 3rd party clouds solve the issue when teams are given budgets to use them.
  - ultraluminous 9y ago
    First of all, as the sibling comment mentioned, no one is waiting for weeks for hardware requisition. Everyone is using virtualized environments and have capacity to spare. Spinning up a new instance in VMware is not harder (in fact easier) than in AWS and hardware costs are SO much cheaper than Amazon's margins. Furthermore, If you have spiking workloads or hyper growth and can't do proper capacity planning - that's exactly the original AWS value prop, run a hybrid private/cloud environment and extend to the cloud when needed.
    - ensignavenger 9y ago
      I beg to differ, I am a systems engineer for a Fortune 500 retailer, and my team has been waiting weeks, and have been told it will be some time next year, for some vmware instances we need. That being said, not every organization is as dysfunctional. I think the best approach would be a hybrid one, where developers could spin up instances in the "cloud", and ops would migrate them into the main infrastructure when it made sense to do so.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

ShakataGaNai 9y ago

So having experienced Ops in both cloud and non cloud companies. A few rebuttals: - Bandwidth is VERY expensive in AWS compared to what you can buy in Datacenters. A 1 GBPS connection is so "cheap" you can get it and a 42U rack at HE.net for $400/mo ( http://he.net/colocation.html http://he.net/colocation.html ). That same 1GBPS is roughly 300TB/month. Assuming it's all outbound - that's roughly $21k in AWS. So bandwidth is a small cost IF you're not moving large amounts of data out of AWS. If you stream media - it can be a HUGE portion of your bill. - HIPAA Compliance - That and other compliance aspects assumes that you need those compliance frameworks. In enterprise world that might be the case (SOC2 and ISO27k1 are very common requirements for Enterprise SaaS clients). However in the B2C? Users don't care. - Waiting for hardware allocation. Once you get to a certain size you have hardware spare, typically. Developers can use that for their tests. You can also have your datacenter/operations group work with your developers during project planning so the code and HW can be ready at the same time. That being said, I don't disagree there are advantages to the cloud. I'm AWS certified, I drink the coolaid. But saying that there are "so many other benefits" is ignoring the fact that there are "so many benefits" to on prem too. There are pro's and cons to both sides.

chaostheory 9y ago
> Waiting for hardware allocation. Once you get to a certain size you have hardware spare Requisitions for non-cloud server resources can takes hours, days, and in some places weeks; even when there is availability depending on the org. At best it takes close to an hour compared to a few seconds in the cloud via a web dashboard.
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  You can use virtualization on prem; it’s trivial. No one is still racking hardware on demand. Don’t want to use Xen or KVM? Kubernetes is your solution if you’re a containers shop. On prem delivery/provisioning is not slower when executed properly.
  - chaostheory 9y ago
    Could be wrong but I don't think virtualization or container technology is the blocker. It's the software that keeps track of who's allowed to use it and who's currently using it that's the problem. With AWS it's easy, because you pay money for the privilege. It's harder for large orgs, when divisions and teams don't directly pay to access servers. 3rd party clouds solve the issue when teams are given budgets to use them.
- ultraluminous 9y ago
  First of all, as the sibling comment mentioned, no one is waiting for weeks for hardware requisition. Everyone is using virtualized environments and have capacity to spare. Spinning up a new instance in VMware is not harder (in fact easier) than in AWS and hardware costs are SO much cheaper than Amazon's margins. Furthermore, If you have spiking workloads or hyper growth and can't do proper capacity planning - that's exactly the original AWS value prop, run a hybrid private/cloud environment and extend to the cloud when needed.
  - ensignavenger 9y ago
    I beg to differ, I am a systems engineer for a Fortune 500 retailer, and my team has been waiting weeks, and have been told it will be some time next year, for some vmware instances we need. That being said, not every organization is as dysfunctional. I think the best approach would be a hybrid one, where developers could spin up instances in the "cloud", and ops would migrate them into the main infrastructure when it made sense to do so.