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Netflix has been "testing the waters" at GCP for years. And as their infrastructure grows, relying on a single cloud provider would be a silly limitation to put
by skywhopper 9y ago
Netflix has been "testing the waters" at GCP for years. And as their infrastructure grows, relying on a single cloud provider would be a silly limitation to put on themselves. Disaster-recovery/failover is a very natural use case for multi-cloud deployments. Not to mention that for certain workloads and patterns, GCP is cheaper and better. Netflix operates at a scale well beyond what most AWS managed services can really address, and broad cloud patterns like object storage, function-as-a-service, VMs, and networks, can be abstracted away given enough resources, which Netflix surely has. Not to mention that at Netflix's scale they have real leverage over cloud providers and what services they offer. They would be stupid _not_ to be playing AWS and GCP against each other for pricing (on which they already get a huge discount) and features.
I'm guessing there's some project getting underway to move/duplicate some subset of resources hosted in AWS on GCP. It's likely a huge project that dwarfs most corporations entire cloud presence, but I'm guessing for Netflix it's a small piece of a giant puzzle, and that the vast majority of their operations are still centered at AWS and will be for years and years to come.
- wiremine 9y agoYou don't have to be Netflix to get AWS, GCP and MS to play against each on pricing. I've seen a number of my clients build a prototype on each platforms, and then use it to make final decision. Part of that final decision is having the cloud vendors compete on price. I personally haven't seen any massive price breaks, but there definitely is room the margins.
- Twirrim 9y agoFor years Dell would let it "leak" out to the press that they were looking at supporting AMD chips. It would happen every year like clockwork. Then after a month you'd hear that Dell and Intel had come up with a new deal to remain Intel exclusive.
- nandhp 9y agoHasn't Dell offered AMD chips for a long time? Dell currently sells AMD-based laptops, and was doing so back in 2008 as well. For example, this Ryzen laptop: http://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/new-inspiron-15-5000/spd/inspiron-15-5575-laptop http://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/new-inspiron-15-...
- sitkack 9y agoThese are probably to prevent action from the FTC.
- ggg9990 9y agoI think they are talking about when Dell made serious profits in PCs.
- acdha 9y agoBefore then – in the 90s both Intel and Microsoft used a lot of backroom deals to keep big vendors exclusive. If memory serves it took the Opteron’s crushing performance advantage before we started seeing that break for Intel servers; Linux users for years were stuck paying for OEM Windows installs which were never used.
- Twirrim 9y agoYes, but I've been around the industry a while. I specifically remember this happening during the late 90s and just in to the 2000s. It was occurring at a time when AMD was fairly firmly beating Intel on a straight $/performance basis (~K6 era). If Dell had started shipping AMD based systems back then it could have been a big game changer. The general narrative around the tech press at the time was that Intel knew this and were desperate to keep Dell as Intel exclusive.
- awakeasleep 9y agoReally playing these companies against each other would mean dynamically balancing your services across the providers based on pricing
- wiremine 9y agoI've love to see some open source tools that manage this automagically for me. :-) It would also require an architecture that supports multiple interfaces. Totally doable (the facade pattern comes to mind) but you'd want to calculate the TCO to see it works out financially.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- mrkurt 9y agoShameless plug: we have an open source tool you can build stuff like this on. It'll run any logic you can implement in JavaScript, we have people doing things like "send traffic to backend with lowest latency" already, it'd be pretty easy to pull in some API data to pick based on cost. https://github.com/superfly/fly https://github.com/superfly/fly
- cortesoft 9y agoI work for a large CDN. Lots of big customers do this, they shift their traffic around between different CDNs based on a lot of metrics, including price and performance.
- dsfyu404ed 9y agoI also work for a CDN. Some of our stuff dynamically utilizes other CDNs. A customer might go try and test deploy something and we might use (AWS or whatever) to do it. It's CDNs all the way down.
- mrkurt 9y agoI work for a company people use to build CDNs. Just another turtle. :D
- wpietri 9y agoIf it's a final decision, then most of the cost is in the future, far beyond the reach of the initial quotes. I've seen too many companies turn extractive (including, of course, that same Microsoft) to ever use the words "final" next to "platform decision".
- auvi 9y ago> (on which they already get a huge discount) just wondering, how huge (as a percentage) that discount is?
- ryanianian 9y agoThey'll play a few games with contracts to spread the costs around (e.g. giving n% discounts for m years of reserved capacity). You probably won't get much just by saying "I can just go to GCP" and asking for the world. The more you spend, the more distinct services you buy, and the longer you want to commit the steeper the discount. I've seen up to 10% but I'm sure they do more for bigger customers.
- falcolas 9y agoI've seen upwards of 50% for some particularly large customers. To the point of "if we lose our discount, our company goes under".
- hinkley 9y agoMakes you wonder if the vendor is still making money on the deal.
- WrtCdEvrydy 9y agoReserved instances always make money because you make profit without depreciation kicking in.
- tedunangst 9y agoMargins are pretty high, in part due to scale. If AWS were to hypothetically sell 80% of capacity at cost, that makes the last 20% more profitable than it would be to just sell the 20% alone.
- notyourday 9y agoThey get CAF. When CAF runs out, pricing shoots up.
- illumin8 9y agoI agree with most of what you said, however, Netflix most definitely does not operate at a scale well beyond what most AWS managed services can address. AWS managed services literally sit behind billions of devices, a scale that makes Netflix look small in comparison: https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/27/apple-now-relies-on-google-cloud-platform-and-amazon-s3-for-icloud-data/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/27/apple-now-relies-on-google...
- jalk 9y agoSeriously? or are you a member of AWFUL - Americans Who Figuratively Use Literally ;)
- odammit 9y agoLiterally has been used as an intensifier for a figurative expression since the 1800s and has been defined in the dictionary that way for quite a while. It was used in this manner by Charles Dickens, James Joyce and American authors as well. Although, it pisses me off when I hear it used that way.