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> (1) your business scales at a different rate than you planned -- either faster or slower are problems! > (2) you have traffic spikes, so you to over-provisio

> (1) your business scales at a different rate than you planned -- either faster or slower are problems! > (2) you have traffic spikes, so you to over-provision. There is then a tradeoff doing it yourself: do you pay for infrastructure you barely ever use, or do you have reliability problems at peak traffic? > (3) your business plans shift or pivot Anyone at any real scale has a multi-datacenter setup and AWS is effectively just a very elastic datacenter you can tap into. You could just as easily tap into Google Cloud or Azure. You do not need to operate 90% of your business in AWS to use AWS. > The corallary of this is, for a well-established business with predictable needs, going in-house will probably be cheaper. But for a growing or changing or inherently unpredictable business, the flexibility AWS sells makes more sense! Its still cheaper to go in-house with a multi-DC setup in anything but a single DC setup in AWS with very few nodes. Architecture for a decent sized business should be setup with 3 DCs in mind /anyway/. You have two primaries, you scale <insert cloud provider> as needed and only leave some DB servers there most of the time.

mancerayder 9y ago
Sure, but isn't the REAL other selling point of AWS aside from an elastic virtual datacenter that it automates away sys admin tasks and ultimately people?
- Spooky23 9y ago
  It’s deemphasized usually because you end up replacing sysadmins with new sysadmins and analysts who can understand billing optimization on AWS or pay way more for AWS. Another commenter on this story mentioned $100k redshift workloads that were optimizable to $2k.
- AFNobody 9y ago
  > Sure, but isn't the REAL other selling point of AWS aside from an elastic virtual datacenter that it automates away sys admin tasks and ultimately people? Yes. AWS shines when you have a small team with no competent DevOps people and a desire to build a single datacenter setup. However, at that scale...we are talking a small business / startup with less than 50 employees. If you are still doing that when you've grown past that point, you've got architectural problems. Once you scale past that point, you still need a competent sysadmin to build a reproducible process...at which point even leasing hardware from any provider works. You cannot build a multi-DC setup that integrates redundant providers without a competent sysadmin. Even if you stick with how AWS has you do things it will eat you alive if you do not optimize your workloads. I'm not sure how you would do that effectively without an experienced sysadmin acting as an analyst.

mancerayder 9y ago

Sure, but isn't the REAL other selling point of AWS aside from an elastic virtual datacenter that it automates away sys admin tasks and ultimately people?

Spooky23 9y ago
It’s deemphasized usually because you end up replacing sysadmins with new sysadmins and analysts who can understand billing optimization on AWS or pay way more for AWS. Another commenter on this story mentioned $100k redshift workloads that were optimizable to $2k.
AFNobody 9y ago
> Sure, but isn't the REAL other selling point of AWS aside from an elastic virtual datacenter that it automates away sys admin tasks and ultimately people? Yes. AWS shines when you have a small team with no competent DevOps people and a desire to build a single datacenter setup. However, at that scale...we are talking a small business / startup with less than 50 employees. If you are still doing that when you've grown past that point, you've got architectural problems. Once you scale past that point, you still need a competent sysadmin to build a reproducible process...at which point even leasing hardware from any provider works. You cannot build a multi-DC setup that integrates redundant providers without a competent sysadmin. Even if you stick with how AWS has you do things it will eat you alive if you do not optimize your workloads. I'm not sure how you would do that effectively without an experienced sysadmin acting as an analyst.