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if I have one job in this life, it's to hang out on hacker news and repeatedly post about how it's not cost effective to run your own infrastructure. 8MM/month
by fierro 8y ago
if I have one job in this life, it's to hang out on hacker news and repeatedly post about how it's not cost effective to run your own infrastructure. 8MM/month doesn't even come CLOSE to needing your own infra.
- person who knows how hard it is to run your own infrastructure
- halbritt 8y agoSo, convince me? - person who knows how hard it is to run your own infrastructure.
- Alupis 8y ago> person who knows how hard it is to run your own infrastructure > fierro Profile: SWE @ Google Resource & Capacity Planning I think you mean "Person who's job it is to convince others it's really hard and they should just buy your product"...?
- fierro 8y agoha sure. I just meant I know the sort of operational burden cloud customers are able to outsource by not rolling their own, based on my time at the G inside resource planning and management.
- tjoff 8y agoYou know anything of the burden to be reliant on someone else for your core operations? And having to invest and adapt so much just to lock yourself to one vendor? For many that alone is more than the operational burden of doing it yourself.
- ericd 8y agoWe ran our own at a significantly smaller scale, it didn't take us nearly as much time to maintain as it saved us in terms of money over cloud.
- spookthesunset 8y agoI promise you weren't actually doing your costing correctly to arrive at that conclusion. Engineers always badly mis-underestimate the costs of things and "rack & stack data center management" is way more costly than you are actually accounting for. Especially in terms of opportunity cost and, well, just wasted resources that aren't actually adding value to the company. There is way, way, way, way, way more to a running a successful business than "saving money".
- Alupis 8y agoMajority of businesses aren't running insane computations at huge scales... Most are running a few small internal-facing servers hosting some internally developed apps, and need very little resources. Just run ESXi, XenServer, Xen or something, and spin up a few VM's on a few thousand dollars of hardware, get a couple people to maintain it, and be done. Even at large scales, like Lyft, having your own internal team and hardware is going to save money. Amazon is profiting off your instances... which leaves room for you to do it for less. Maybe not $7mm less monthly, but even a $1mm savings is significant... but likely a lot more.
- jmathai 8y agoThey're making $200 million / month based on their S-1 filing. I'm sure they've done the math and the effort to cost savings here simply isn't worth it to them.
- Alupis 8y agoOr, more likely, in the beginning AWS is what their developers knew and were familiar with, and then as time went on it was easy and convenient to just spin up "one more instance". Fast forward to today, and now it would be a serious undertaking with serious risks to move off AWS, not to mention the costs of building up the staff and assets to reimplement their requirements in parallel of AWS until reasonably confident they can flip the switch and still have an operating company afterward. So, they're probably stuck - beholden to Amazon's whims and pricing mood of the day. They've bought convenience from Amazon in trade for massive technical debt, one which may be even more costly to get out of... Or impossible. AWS isn't going to get any cheaper in the future.. Those free AWS credits Amazon gives students really pay dividends.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]