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This isn't entirely surprising. On-premise infrastructure is getting extremely hard to scale for high scale services like gaming. Google, Amazon, and Microsoft
by hkarthik 7y ago
This isn't entirely surprising. On-premise infrastructure is getting extremely hard to scale for high scale services like gaming. Google, Amazon, and Microsoft have completely bent the market for data centers and hardware due to their cloud footprints. At this point, you have to be fairly niche or have really strong security requirements to justify the time and cost of not building on AWS, Azure, or GCP at that scale.
From what I understand, even Apple is starting to build more of its services infrastructure in the cloud, although those agreements aren't being widely broadcasted.
With that view, it should be obvious that a hardware-focused company like Sony simply could not scale the internal teams and infrastructure required to support high scale software services like on-demand gaming. They were going to have pick a cloud infra provider, and with every cloud provider also making their own foray into gaming, they had to make frenemies with someone.
- pm90 7y agoUmmmm what? Even if they wanted to use the cloud they could have literally opted for any of the other providers. If you have a good on premise service provider and reasonable compute/scaling requirements, staying on prem can actually save you a ton of money. It’s very situation specific. That being said, for companies starting out, I agree completely with you that starting in the cloud is the best strategy.
- wongarsu 7y agoIn lots of datacenters around the world you can rent anything from space for a single server to entire rooms of servers with your own access control. That offers you more locations than AWS/GCP/Azure at a lower price (if you only want compute and your load isn't uncommonly bursty pretty much anything is cheaper than the big three cloud offerings, even more so if you have a bandwith intensive application like streaming).
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- mappu 7y ago> you have to be fairly niche I think they qualify - Sony need rackmounted PS3 and PS4 hardware, since the games in question won't run on standard AWS/Azure GPU instances.
- HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago> Sony need rackmounted PS3 and PS4 hardware The PS4 is built with a custom Ryzen-based APU. Because Ryzen is x86_64-based, it's likely possible that they could also make machines that are architecturally compatible- they could probably get away with a compute box filled with similar, if not better, graphics chips / cards, use an EPYC processor with all its cores and PCIE lanes to connect everything up, and then virtualize it. For the PS3, however, they would definitely need something very custom- their Cell processors are very different from anything else on the market, but they also already have a service for that, but I have no idea how those work- they obviously have something, though.
- baron816 7y agoI've been wondering what Microsoft gets out of this deal. Sony doesn't really have the size or the expertise to even continue in a gaming market that has moved entirely to the cloud. Microsoft could just let them die. Makes me think Microsoft has something sinister planned where they're able to take a lot of Sony's IP without paying for it.