5 ms·

I think it is because many people's bill is not primarily in EC2. AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure's biggest value add come from managed services, like auto scalin

I think it is because many people's bill is not primarily in EC2. AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure's biggest value add come from managed services, like auto scaling databases and VMs. It makes it a lot easier for a small startup to build out their services without thinking about scaling challenges. Snapchat, for example, was built on google app engine and to this day has billions of dollars in contracts with Google Cloud. They scaled their app to millions of users remarkably well with what I hear was just 2 guys. No one does a startup because they expect it to stay small, so eating the upfront cost of using a managed service is a reasonable price to pay for peace of mind if things take off and the team can't keep up. Hiring people to manage infrastructure and do it well is likely more expensive in many scenarios.

tinalumfoil 8y ago
I'd be interested to see an analysis for a typical startup of when managing your own infrastructure becomes less expensive than managed services from cloud providers. I'd imagine it has to be pretty high considering most startups don't rush to leave AWS even after becoming massive.
- tedivm 8y ago
  Once a startup has seed funding it can typically get a ton of free credits from AWS using their "activate" program. Depending on the company this can be anywhere from $15k to $250k in AWS credits (although $100k seems to be the most common). https://aws.amazon.com/activate/ https://aws.amazon.com/activate/
bpicolo 8y ago
This. If people wanted to manage dumb boxes it would be a no-brainer, but there's a crap ton of value add on managed services
indogooner 8y ago
Interesting that you say this. In my experience EC2 instances have been major part of bill. Can't comment on Snapchat scaling with just 2 guys but I have seen people trip up with managed services as well for eg. DynamoDB (https://hackernoon.com/beware-of-dilution-of-dynamodb-throughput-due-to-excessive-scaling-4df51063edae https://hackernoon.com/beware-of-dilution-of-dynamodb-throug...). Similarly for EMR - lot of issues where you still needed to understand how Hadoop was managed by EMR (Spark and HBase versions, jar mismatch, classpaths). So if you are getting into something complex you still need to hire people to manage infrastructure of course not at the same level as building your own DC but OP is talking about using a cheaper cloud provider. My personal opinion is to use EC2 and then take managed services from cloud agnostic vendor (preferably Open Source at core providing services on all major clouds). Does not lock you and lets you move fast - ex. Managed Kafka/Hortonworks

tinalumfoil 8y ago

I'd be interested to see an analysis for a typical startup of when managing your own infrastructure becomes less expensive than managed services from cloud providers. I'd imagine it has to be pretty high considering most startups don't rush to leave AWS even after becoming massive.

tedivm 8y ago
Once a startup has seed funding it can typically get a ton of free credits from AWS using their "activate" program. Depending on the company this can be anywhere from $15k to $250k in AWS credits (although $100k seems to be the most common). https://aws.amazon.com/activate/ https://aws.amazon.com/activate/

bpicolo 8y ago

This. If people wanted to manage dumb boxes it would be a no-brainer, but there's a crap ton of value add on managed services

indogooner 8y ago

Interesting that you say this. In my experience EC2 instances have been major part of bill. Can't comment on Snapchat scaling with just 2 guys but I have seen people trip up with managed services as well for eg. DynamoDB (https://hackernoon.com/beware-of-dilution-of-dynamodb-throughput-due-to-excessive-scaling-4df51063edae https://hackernoon.com/beware-of-dilution-of-dynamodb-throug...). Similarly for EMR - lot of issues where you still needed to understand how Hadoop was managed by EMR (Spark and HBase versions, jar mismatch, classpaths). So if you are getting into something complex you still need to hire people to manage infrastructure of course not at the same level as building your own DC but OP is talking about using a cheaper cloud provider. My personal opinion is to use EC2 and then take managed services from cloud agnostic vendor (preferably Open Source at core providing services on all major clouds). Does not lock you and lets you move fast - ex. Managed Kafka/Hortonworks