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You are right with this analysis. The only thing to add is why Amazon still isn’t the only choice and why sometimes it is in fact better to not use it. Your co
by IgorPartola 9y ago
You are right with this analysis. The only thing to add is why Amazon still isn’t the only choice and why sometimes it is in fact better to not use it.
Your comment makes it sound like unless you know your growth pattern, can predict your spikes, don’t plan to pivot, and you know these things perfectly, you will lose. That’s not the case. The reason for that is that you have a quite significant cost difference between AWS and DIY. DIY is cheaper by a significant enough margin that you might be able to buy, say, double the capacity you need and still spend less. So if you made a mistake of up to 2x your growth and your spikes, you are still fine.
Even if you are a small operation, you still have the option to lease hardware. Then your response time to add new servers is usually hours, not days like if you were to go the full own-your-hardware route.
As an exercise, you can try to rent and benchmark a $300/month server from e.g. SoftLayer and then compare that against a $300/month EC2 instance. Chances are, you will be blown away by the performance difference.
- mylons 9y agoyou make a good point, but my anecdotal story from experience says you really need 10-30x your average capacity for peak times instead of double. an ideal world would be you have your "cheap" datacenter that you use most of the time, and somehow extend into the cloud for the true rare event when you need 30x. I'm not sure how feasible that is, though
- IgorPartola 9y agoDepends on your workload. If your see this traffic pattern, then yes you absolutely are a candidate for the cloud. But if you are, say, an ecommerce shop and your spike is just double your regular traffic, then who knows what’s better.
- brodock 9y agoCan't you use a hybrid strategy and use the cloud only to handle the peak load? Handling variable load is not free in the cloud, so if you are going to pay it anyway, you can keep your predictable cost down and use the cloud when you have that temporary extra load.
- thesz 9y agoCan you use AWS for extraordinary peaks and DIY solution for cooler periods of time?
- guitarbill 9y agoI don't think anybody will argue that if you have a specialised workload (CPU heavy, storage heavy, etc) there's definitely cost savings at scale for DIY over cloud. But the calculation is harder than that. People are terrible at estimating the ops personnel cost for DIY. Turns out it's hard running with minimal downtime, or engineering hardware + software to be fault-tolerant. It's hard to put a price on dev tools/APIs/doco/the whole eco-system. Especially for that last reason, I have never been "blown away" by Softlayer, even when their instances were way beefier than anything AWS/GCP offered. YMMV.
- IgorPartola 9y agoFirst I don’t mean SoftLayer’s cloud. I mean their physical boxes. A dual processor Xeon that is all your own is a lot. Second, it depends on your expertise. And you don’t need scale. I ran a successfully bit of infrastructure on SL with seven servers that was quite a bit cheaper than an equivalent AWS setup. I was pretty much solely responsible for the infrastructure and still my responsibilities included more than 80% coding and later management. Given my salary at the time, it was quite cost effective.
- imbkr 9y agowas the comparison based on on-demand instances or reserved instances? we reserve almost all of our instances within our company for 3 years and also get an extra discount on top of it. based on my calculations, i've seen AWS cheapest out of all. would like to know if i'm missing anything
- IgorPartola 9y agoThis was a few years ago so prices have changed on both sides. What I advocate is doing exactly what you did: do a comparison with actual numbers and performance stats instead of hand waving that the cloud is always best.
- mgkimsal 9y ago