4 ms·

Bang on. Realistically the value of Amazon's managed side is in the early stages. At latter stages with people, it's significantly lower cost to tune real res

by cik 8y ago

Bang on. Realistically the value of Amazon's managed side is in the early stages. At latter stages with people, it's significantly lower cost to tune real resources, and you get added performance benefits. We make a decent business out of doing just this, at scale for clients today.

rashkov 8y ago
Would love to hear more about that business — do you help people go from cloud back to on-prem?
- cik 8y ago
  We're all about mixed mode. Let's never pretend that we ought focus on a specific one and only business. Clients like Amazon, clients like Azure - clients then get forced by (say the BC Health Authority) to run on physical machines in a British Columbia hosted datacenter. We help make that happen, and help folks manage the lifecycle associated with it.
- user5994461 8y ago
  Companies just really suck at managing hardware or resources. The bigger and the more consultants they get, the more terrible they get, that's what you come after. Chances are you will find tens of instances without any naming or tagging, of the more expensive types, created by previous dudes who long left. Thanks to AWS tooling it's easy to identify them, see if they use any resource and either delete or scale down dramatically.
  - cik 8y ago
    It's not a size thing - it's all companies, and it's about significantly more than just 'finding instances'. The 'finding instances' side of AWS is something we just do for free (AWS, Azure, etc) for our existing customers. Our goal is to provide actual value and do real DevOps work, regardless of whether you're AWS, Azure, GCP, etc. This includes physical, mixed-mode, cloud bursting, and changing constantly. <----- That's what keeps it interesting.
raviolo 8y ago
Agree. AWS and the likes is an awesome tool to get access to a lot of compute power quickly which is great for unexpectedly large workloads or experimenting during early stages. For established businesses/processes the cost of running on premises is often significantly lower. We manage about 150T of data for company on relatively inexpensive raid array + one replica + offline backup. It is accessible on our 10Gbps intranet for processing cluster, users to pull to their workstations, etc. The whole thing is running on stock HP servers for many years and never had outages beyond disks (which are in raid) predicting failure and maybe one redundant PSU failure. We did the math of replicating what we have with Amazon or Google and it would cost a fortune.
scarface74 8y ago
If that were universally true, then why did Netflix go all in on AWS?
- hackerpacker 8y ago
  hype maybe? Got a backroom deal for the exposure? Oh, and you probably aren't netflix either. But they have a pretty severe case of vendor lock in now, will be interesting to see how it plays out. As of 2018 they spend 40 million on cloud services, 23 million of that on aws. Do you think you are gonna get AWS's attention with that $10 s3 instance when something goes wrong?!? You will have negative leverage after signing up for vendor lock in. I'll take linux servers any day, thanks.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    So you think Netflix was suckered into using AWS and if they had just listened to random people on HN they would have made different choices? I’m sure with all of your developers using the repository pattern to “abstract their database access”, you can change your database at the drop of a dime. Companies rarely change infrastructure wholesale no matter how many levels of abstraction you put in front of your resources. While at the same time you’re spending money maintaining hardware instead of focusing on your business’s competitive advantage.
    - hackerpacker 8y ago
      so, you might be dealing with some half/truths here. Netflix does NOT use aws for their meat and potatoes streaming, just the housekeeping. They use OWS for the heavy lifting. https://www.networkworld.com/article/3037428/netflix-is-not-really-all-in-on-amazon-s-cloud.html https://www.networkworld.com/article/3037428/netflix-is-not-... But re: maintaining hardware, I only maintain my dev box these days. We are fine with hosted linux services, but backup/monitoring/updating is just too trivial, and the hosting so affordable (and predictable) w/linux it would have to be a hype/marketing/nepotic decision to switch to aws in our case. The internet is still built on a backbone and run by linux, any programmer would be foolhardy to ignore that bit of reality for very long.

by cik 8y ago

rashkov 8y ago

Would love to hear more about that business — do you help people go from cloud back to on-prem?

cik 8y ago
We're all about mixed mode. Let's never pretend that we ought focus on a specific one and only business. Clients like Amazon, clients like Azure - clients then get forced by (say the BC Health Authority) to run on physical machines in a British Columbia hosted datacenter. We help make that happen, and help folks manage the lifecycle associated with it.
user5994461 8y ago
Companies just really suck at managing hardware or resources. The bigger and the more consultants they get, the more terrible they get, that's what you come after. Chances are you will find tens of instances without any naming or tagging, of the more expensive types, created by previous dudes who long left. Thanks to AWS tooling it's easy to identify them, see if they use any resource and either delete or scale down dramatically.
- cik 8y ago
  It's not a size thing - it's all companies, and it's about significantly more than just 'finding instances'. The 'finding instances' side of AWS is something we just do for free (AWS, Azure, etc) for our existing customers. Our goal is to provide actual value and do real DevOps work, regardless of whether you're AWS, Azure, GCP, etc. This includes physical, mixed-mode, cloud bursting, and changing constantly. <----- That's what keeps it interesting.

raviolo 8y ago

Agree. AWS and the likes is an awesome tool to get access to a lot of compute power quickly which is great for unexpectedly large workloads or experimenting during early stages. For established businesses/processes the cost of running on premises is often significantly lower. We manage about 150T of data for company on relatively inexpensive raid array + one replica + offline backup. It is accessible on our 10Gbps intranet for processing cluster, users to pull to their workstations, etc. The whole thing is running on stock HP servers for many years and never had outages beyond disks (which are in raid) predicting failure and maybe one redundant PSU failure. We did the math of replicating what we have with Amazon or Google and it would cost a fortune.

scarface74 8y ago

If that were universally true, then why did Netflix go all in on AWS?

hackerpacker 8y ago
hype maybe? Got a backroom deal for the exposure? Oh, and you probably aren't netflix either. But they have a pretty severe case of vendor lock in now, will be interesting to see how it plays out. As of 2018 they spend 40 million on cloud services, 23 million of that on aws. Do you think you are gonna get AWS's attention with that $10 s3 instance when something goes wrong?!? You will have negative leverage after signing up for vendor lock in. I'll take linux servers any day, thanks.
- scarface74 8y ago
  So you think Netflix was suckered into using AWS and if they had just listened to random people on HN they would have made different choices? I’m sure with all of your developers using the repository pattern to “abstract their database access”, you can change your database at the drop of a dime. Companies rarely change infrastructure wholesale no matter how many levels of abstraction you put in front of your resources. While at the same time you’re spending money maintaining hardware instead of focusing on your business’s competitive advantage.
  - hackerpacker 8y ago
    so, you might be dealing with some half/truths here. Netflix does NOT use aws for their meat and potatoes streaming, just the housekeeping. They use OWS for the heavy lifting. https://www.networkworld.com/article/3037428/netflix-is-not-really-all-in-on-amazon-s-cloud.html https://www.networkworld.com/article/3037428/netflix-is-not-... But re: maintaining hardware, I only maintain my dev box these days. We are fine with hosted linux services, but backup/monitoring/updating is just too trivial, and the hosting so affordable (and predictable) w/linux it would have to be a hype/marketing/nepotic decision to switch to aws in our case. The internet is still built on a backbone and run by linux, any programmer would be foolhardy to ignore that bit of reality for very long.