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And just remember, public clouds are expensive. If you need to handle millions of requests per second then there is a very high probability that you can afford

And just remember, public clouds are expensive. If you need to handle millions of requests per second then there is a very high probability that you can afford a dedicated infrastructure team and save a ton of money while working just as well. Just look at the insane(!!!) bandwidth costs...

withhighprod 8y ago
A dedicated infrastructure team could cost more in long term with current salary level. It’s not easy to find engineers not operating themselves on public cloud. It ends up reinventing the wheel. Honestly high rps doesn’t mean the investors will agree it’s time to buy hardwares
fma 8y ago
I'm a bit naive when it comes to infrastructure, since I've never managed it myself. I've always been in companies with dedicated infrastructure :). Why does Netflix outsource to AWS? The gripes I've had with dedicated infrastructure team is their knowledge/experience can be hit or miss. My current company is about saving money, so sometimes there's junior guys on there. Or there's guys who need to handle 20 different products, they're good at 10..but suck at the other 10. I personally don't believe they have best practices (but I'm not an infrastructure expert), because downtime happens.
- bboreham 8y ago
  Netflix couldn’t predict its load in the early days, so saved a ton of money using pay-as-you-ngo rather than building out datacenters. Nowadays they are such a good advert for AWS they probably negotiated a deal which is way cheaper than the published price. Also Netflix’ major cost is content; servers are kind of a rounding error.
- sokoloff 8y ago
  AFAIK, Netflix does not stream out of AWS, but instead "just" runs their application services on AWS (which is still a significant workload). I seem to recall they offered a rack full of their own caching equipment to medium and larger ISPs (to save both sides streaming costs while providing better service to Netflix customers). Basically a private app-specific CDN.
  - fredsted 8y ago
    It's true. If you open Web Inspector while streaming a Netflix movie, the URL it's getting the stream from probably contains your ISP name and region!
- philg_jr 8y ago
  Netflix maintains their own CDN for video content. They place a rack (multiple racks?) in many different datacenters close to the ISP last mile (possibly within some ISP's own datacenters?). https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/ https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/
- LaserToy 8y ago
  Who knows,but I bet some sweet deal was involved. When Netflix started using AWS it wasn’t a thing, it was pretty bad datacenter. Even amazon.com wasn’t using aws (contrary to their marketing material).
amelius 8y ago
I guess public clouds are mostly useful when you have a sudden peak in visits, or if you need to scale up very quickly.
Thaxll 8y ago
Explain how do you replicate the features of AWS yourself? There is a reason why OpenStack never really took of.
- closeparen 8y ago
  A Storage team to manage MySQL/Postgres. A Compute team to run Kubernetes/Mesos. A Networking team to manage service discovery, load balancing, structured RPC, etc. Nothing precludes using AWS/GCP in limited ways, where the value proposition is especially good. Just not for the base capacity in your core infrastructure.
  - throwaway98121 8y ago
    I’m sure this is a great idea at some San Francisco start up full of unicorns who can do everything backed by endless venture capitalist cash. I have spent a good chunk of my career at a Fortune 10 energy company. We hired people who specialized in working with SAP, Oracle databases, MSSQL, messaging (think MSFT Lync), email infrastructure, physical servers for web apps, Cisco, desktop provisioning, application development, mobile device management, ticketing software, etc. etc. It’s very hard and very expensive to acquire the right talent to manage a particular technology, administer it, support it, etc. Every vended software we work with has some company that looks at our name and comes up with some outrageous cost for a few licenses, dev seats, or whatever their business model is. Acquiring the right quality talent is even harder. You bring them in. You try to teach them about your business so they feel valued and part of something big. They don’t stick around. They want to be at the Googles and Amazons of the world. They leave. In this scenario, I’d rather use SQS than try to interview, hire, train, and make the hardware/software investment in running an SQS equivalent service in house. I don’t want to hire DBAs and build that profession in my org. It’s not our core business. My customers in the business don’t give a shit about it. They want something fast, reliable, and dependable. Fundamentally, this argument of just do it yourself to save money is short sighted. There are a lot of factors. If you believe hiring Some internal teams is always cheaper than using managed services, you’re in for a world of hurt.
    - 8y ago

withhighprod 8y ago

A dedicated infrastructure team could cost more in long term with current salary level. It’s not easy to find engineers not operating themselves on public cloud. It ends up reinventing the wheel. Honestly high rps doesn’t mean the investors will agree it’s time to buy hardwares

fma 8y ago

I'm a bit naive when it comes to infrastructure, since I've never managed it myself. I've always been in companies with dedicated infrastructure :). Why does Netflix outsource to AWS? The gripes I've had with dedicated infrastructure team is their knowledge/experience can be hit or miss. My current company is about saving money, so sometimes there's junior guys on there. Or there's guys who need to handle 20 different products, they're good at 10..but suck at the other 10. I personally don't believe they have best practices (but I'm not an infrastructure expert), because downtime happens.

bboreham 8y ago
Netflix couldn’t predict its load in the early days, so saved a ton of money using pay-as-you-ngo rather than building out datacenters. Nowadays they are such a good advert for AWS they probably negotiated a deal which is way cheaper than the published price. Also Netflix’ major cost is content; servers are kind of a rounding error.
sokoloff 8y ago
AFAIK, Netflix does not stream out of AWS, but instead "just" runs their application services on AWS (which is still a significant workload). I seem to recall they offered a rack full of their own caching equipment to medium and larger ISPs (to save both sides streaming costs while providing better service to Netflix customers). Basically a private app-specific CDN.
- fredsted 8y ago
  It's true. If you open Web Inspector while streaming a Netflix movie, the URL it's getting the stream from probably contains your ISP name and region!
philg_jr 8y ago
Netflix maintains their own CDN for video content. They place a rack (multiple racks?) in many different datacenters close to the ISP last mile (possibly within some ISP's own datacenters?). https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/ https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/
LaserToy 8y ago
Who knows,but I bet some sweet deal was involved. When Netflix started using AWS it wasn’t a thing, it was pretty bad datacenter. Even amazon.com wasn’t using aws (contrary to their marketing material).

amelius 8y ago

I guess public clouds are mostly useful when you have a sudden peak in visits, or if you need to scale up very quickly.

Thaxll 8y ago

Explain how do you replicate the features of AWS yourself? There is a reason why OpenStack never really took of.

closeparen 8y ago
A Storage team to manage MySQL/Postgres. A Compute team to run Kubernetes/Mesos. A Networking team to manage service discovery, load balancing, structured RPC, etc. Nothing precludes using AWS/GCP in limited ways, where the value proposition is especially good. Just not for the base capacity in your core infrastructure.
- throwaway98121 8y ago
  I’m sure this is a great idea at some San Francisco start up full of unicorns who can do everything backed by endless venture capitalist cash. I have spent a good chunk of my career at a Fortune 10 energy company. We hired people who specialized in working with SAP, Oracle databases, MSSQL, messaging (think MSFT Lync), email infrastructure, physical servers for web apps, Cisco, desktop provisioning, application development, mobile device management, ticketing software, etc. etc. It’s very hard and very expensive to acquire the right talent to manage a particular technology, administer it, support it, etc. Every vended software we work with has some company that looks at our name and comes up with some outrageous cost for a few licenses, dev seats, or whatever their business model is. Acquiring the right quality talent is even harder. You bring them in. You try to teach them about your business so they feel valued and part of something big. They don’t stick around. They want to be at the Googles and Amazons of the world. They leave. In this scenario, I’d rather use SQS than try to interview, hire, train, and make the hardware/software investment in running an SQS equivalent service in house. I don’t want to hire DBAs and build that profession in my org. It’s not our core business. My customers in the business don’t give a shit about it. They want something fast, reliable, and dependable. Fundamentally, this argument of just do it yourself to save money is short sighted. There are a lot of factors. If you believe hiring Some internal teams is always cheaper than using managed services, you’re in for a world of hurt.
  - 8y ago