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Worked for Amazon a few years back. I can't see Amazon ever using external cloud hosting for anything except the most trivial of tasks. They're absolutely, utt

Worked for Amazon a few years back. I can't see Amazon ever using external cloud hosting for anything except the most trivial of tasks. They're absolutely, utterly paranoid about any sort of confidential information, and I think even with encryption the perceived risk would be too high.

rb808 8y ago
lol, meanwhile everyone else is trusting aws.
- antonvs 8y ago
  Most companies can't afford to implement all the security and compliance measures that AWS, Google, or Azure does. The asymmetry in trust is partly because those cloud providers are huge, and partly because those things are part of their core competency.
- stone-monkey 8y ago
  I don't see their comment as paranoid because cloud providers generally aee incompetent/steal your data, but because other cloud providers are direct competitors. Even if they're not sifting through your server data, they can possibly try to get a competitive advantage by analyzing things like usage data as someone above pointed out.
  - brownbat 8y ago
    When AT&T was forced by law to allow MCI switching equipment in their facilities, they tended to leave that room's window open, so pigeons could nest in the equipment. (I might have a detail wrong, this and a hundred other great telecom anecdotes are in The Master Switch.) Always nice to make sure no parties you depend on have conflicting interests.
- insensible 8y ago
  I know of a big company that competes with Amazon outside the cloud that pressures its vendors not to use AWS for any of its data.
  - SpaceRaccoon 8y ago
    Ebay? Walmart? Alibaba?
    - rb808 8y ago
      Walmart was news last year. https://www.techrepublic.com/article/walmart-forces-tech-partners-to-leave-aws-following-whole-foods-acquisition/ https://www.techrepublic.com/article/walmart-forces-tech-par...
    - scarejunba 8y ago
      Walmart, Carrefour
- camtarn 8y ago
  I know, right? Always seemed a tiny bit hypocritical to me.
- amorousf00p 8y ago
  That's sad truth. But it's convenience like anything else. In my business I can put a hardware site online with ---6X--- 2 x intel gold 5115 10 core + 64 GB RAM 1 nvme @512G + soft raid1 @4TB magnetic 1 10G, 2 1G ether ~= 42K. ---2X--- storage or NAS with 60TB @RAID5 + 2x quad core low end xeon + 32 GB RAM = 16k ---2X--- 1G edge/core mngd switches + 10G SAN/LAN mngd switches = 5K ---2X--- Endian firewalls + threat appliances = 5K ---1X--- Colo with 2 year lease and 25 amps @208v 1g port speed and committed throughput > 100/mbps = 16K yearly 68K one time cost for depreciating assets we maintain, provision and secure + 16K yearly recurring cost. Or I can go AWS and modify my processing model, security expectations and service infra and spend 25K a year + 15K 1x migration cost.
  - jjeaff 8y ago
    So... you save $9k a year in recurring and it will be more than 5 years before you break even due to your $68k up front equipment costs. And that's assuming you don't have any needs to quickly scale up or down and you are limited to 1 colo instead of the ability to expand to multiple regions like with AWS. And that's not even taking into account the cost of the brain power to make sure your hardware stays up and running. Doesn't sound like rolling your own stuff in a colo is a very good idea in this case. But that's job security if you are the sys admin I guess.
    - mmt 8y ago
      > And that's not even taking into account the cost of the brain power to make sure your hardware stays up and running. Although, as I said upthread, I agree that AWS is very likely ideal for this particular deployment size, let me try to dispell this oft-repeated myth. Modern server hardware takes almost no "brain power" (or effort of any kind) to keep up and running. We aren't living in the days of the early dot-com boom where Linux-on-Intel in the datacenter could mean flimsy cases, barely rack-mountable, with nary a redundant part to be seen. Applying some up front "brain power", one can even choose and configure hardware in such a way as to provide things like server-level redundancy, if that's important and/or preferable to intra-server redundancy (think Hadoop), or the ability to abandon mechanical disks in place instead of ever having to replace one.

rb808 8y ago

lol, meanwhile everyone else is trusting aws.

antonvs 8y ago
Most companies can't afford to implement all the security and compliance measures that AWS, Google, or Azure does. The asymmetry in trust is partly because those cloud providers are huge, and partly because those things are part of their core competency.
stone-monkey 8y ago
I don't see their comment as paranoid because cloud providers generally aee incompetent/steal your data, but because other cloud providers are direct competitors. Even if they're not sifting through your server data, they can possibly try to get a competitive advantage by analyzing things like usage data as someone above pointed out.
- brownbat 8y ago
  When AT&T was forced by law to allow MCI switching equipment in their facilities, they tended to leave that room's window open, so pigeons could nest in the equipment. (I might have a detail wrong, this and a hundred other great telecom anecdotes are in The Master Switch.) Always nice to make sure no parties you depend on have conflicting interests.
insensible 8y ago
I know of a big company that competes with Amazon outside the cloud that pressures its vendors not to use AWS for any of its data.
- SpaceRaccoon 8y ago
  Ebay? Walmart? Alibaba?
  - rb808 8y ago
    Walmart was news last year. https://www.techrepublic.com/article/walmart-forces-tech-partners-to-leave-aws-following-whole-foods-acquisition/ https://www.techrepublic.com/article/walmart-forces-tech-par...
  - scarejunba 8y ago
    Walmart, Carrefour
camtarn 8y ago
I know, right? Always seemed a tiny bit hypocritical to me.
amorousf00p 8y ago
That's sad truth. But it's convenience like anything else. In my business I can put a hardware site online with ---6X--- 2 x intel gold 5115 10 core + 64 GB RAM 1 nvme @512G + soft raid1 @4TB magnetic 1 10G, 2 1G ether ~= 42K. ---2X--- storage or NAS with 60TB @RAID5 + 2x quad core low end xeon + 32 GB RAM = 16k ---2X--- 1G edge/core mngd switches + 10G SAN/LAN mngd switches = 5K ---2X--- Endian firewalls + threat appliances = 5K ---1X--- Colo with 2 year lease and 25 amps @208v 1g port speed and committed throughput > 100/mbps = 16K yearly 68K one time cost for depreciating assets we maintain, provision and secure + 16K yearly recurring cost. Or I can go AWS and modify my processing model, security expectations and service infra and spend 25K a year + 15K 1x migration cost.
- jjeaff 8y ago
  So... you save $9k a year in recurring and it will be more than 5 years before you break even due to your $68k up front equipment costs. And that's assuming you don't have any needs to quickly scale up or down and you are limited to 1 colo instead of the ability to expand to multiple regions like with AWS. And that's not even taking into account the cost of the brain power to make sure your hardware stays up and running. Doesn't sound like rolling your own stuff in a colo is a very good idea in this case. But that's job security if you are the sys admin I guess.
  - mmt 8y ago
    > And that's not even taking into account the cost of the brain power to make sure your hardware stays up and running. Although, as I said upthread, I agree that AWS is very likely ideal for this particular deployment size, let me try to dispell this oft-repeated myth. Modern server hardware takes almost no "brain power" (or effort of any kind) to keep up and running. We aren't living in the days of the early dot-com boom where Linux-on-Intel in the datacenter could mean flimsy cases, barely rack-mountable, with nary a redundant part to be seen. Applying some up front "brain power", one can even choose and configure hardware in such a way as to provide things like server-level redundancy, if that's important and/or preferable to intra-server redundancy (think Hadoop), or the ability to abandon mechanical disks in place instead of ever having to replace one.