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Why are people so obsessed by AWS? It is one of the most expensive hosting solutions that tries hard to lock you into their ecosystem. I somewhat understand wh

• Phr0ztByte 7y ago
  I completely agree. Most startup's can do with cheaper or even bare-metal hosting for years before having to use highly-scalable solutions like AWS.
  • tuananh 7y ago
    It's more complicated than that. Sometimes, the decision is not just in the engineers' hands. eg - our clients (airlines) would very much prefer we use AWS over the smaller, lesser known offering.
    • thu2111 7y ago
      What justification do the airlines give for placing demands on your own suppliers?
      • tuananh 7y ago
        i'm not familiar with that part. also sale people can make all kind of promises to close the deal.
      • tyingq 7y ago
        It's pretty common for Fortune 500 type companies to ask for all sorts of intrusive terms they perceive as a benefit to them. Indemnity, long net payment terms, penalties for missed SLA, etc. They could be specifying AWS in this case to reduce latency and/or avoid the internet as a dependency. Maybe the client side is on AWS already, or they already have high bandwidth / dual path via AWS direct connect, and don't wish to do that for a different provider. The reward being that once you're in, they are too big and slow to ever move away from your product.
      • karatestomp 7y ago
        "We want it because it makes our lives (specifically, probably some paperwork) easier. Do you still want our money or not?"
  • amedvednikov 7y ago
    Not necessarily. StackOverflow runs on a couple of servers.
  • rumanator 7y ago
    How much would it cost to get someone dedicated to manage your bare metal infrastructure? In this day and age, where using ansible or terraform is considered close to the metal, how much would it cost you to manage your own server? And what about scaling? That's precisely the problem. Bare metal hosts are unbeatable in cost, but fixed costs render them too expensive for a startup. Then, when fixed costs start to become irrelevant, you need to factor in the cost of rearchitecting your solution. Then, when both of those costs become irrelevant, you already have the entire team trained and experienced in using a cloud service provider.
    • vidarh 7y ago
      As someone who has been that "someone dedicated to managing your bare metal infrastructure": It will typicall cost less than that "someone dedicated to ensuring your AWS setup is correct and works and handle all the regular config changes". I know that first hand for having done both, and seeing how the AWS systems consistently earned me more money, and how rarely I had to deal with the bare metal (I've done anything from actual own hardware in colos to renting servers from places like Hetzner; when I was handling servers in two separate colos I spent on average a day a year in each of them, the rest was done by "remote hands" at the data centre) > That's precisely the problem. Bare metal hosts are unbeatable in cost, but fixed costs render them too expensive for a startup. Then, when fixed costs start to become irrelevant, you need to factor in the cost of rearchitecting your solution. Actually buying hardware is too expensive. But coloing leased hardware or renting on a month by month bases from a dedicated hosting provider costs about the same when you amortize over a three year period unless you're physically located somewhere with cheap land. E.g. I work out of London, and when I was doing this we eventually deprecated the own hardware in favour of renting from Hetzner because colo space in London was so much more expensive that the savings on the actual hardware couldn't make up for it. > Then, when fixed costs start to become irrelevant, you need to factor in the cost of rearchitecting your solution. Or you architect it properly from the start. I've done zero downtime migration between AWS, GCE and Hetzner. I've had systems that tied in cloud instances, VMs running on our own hardware, containers running on dedicated instances, and VMS on rented hardware, all tied into a single system. If you run everything in containers anyway, all you need to make that happen is a simple orchestration system and a reliable network overlay, and an architecture that ensures reliable replication of your data. Once you've done that, you're free to pick and choose and migrate services as you please depending on cost and need, and it really is not that hard to get working - you already do most of the necessary planning if you are setting up a reproducible cloud setup anyway.
• tuananh 7y ago
  there was several reasons for our case. There might be more for other startups. Here are some: - our clients (airlines) would very much prefer we use AWS over the smaller, lesser known offering. - AWS offer free promotional credits for startups. - AWS when utilized right (requires work) is not much more expensive than traditional hosting. - Etc...
  • joana035 7y ago
    Those are the most expensive computers I ever saw: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/dedicated-hosts/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/dedicated-hosts/pricing/
    • oblio 7y ago
      Maybe you haven't seen enough computers? :-p Internal IT departments or hosting providers meant for highly regulated environments can charge 5-10x that for a VM of a similar size :-)
      • joana035 7y ago
        So that will be 50-100x more expensive than Hetzner?
        • kasey_junk 7y ago
          Yes
• originalvichy 7y ago
  Because the cloud providers advertise to tech startups. They are told that the scalability of the cloud is needed, because YOUR startup can become an overnight success and can’t handle the traffic. This combined with how unsexy most of the VPS or dedicated hosting providers look makes the cloud providers a seemingly good choice for startups.
  • oblio 7y ago
    I'm not sure this is the only reason. Clouds are super, super attractive to stodgy, boring enterprises. And people here working in start up environments are not aware how much hardware from internal IT departments costs. Internal IT departments are generally way less efficient than the cutthroat cloud providers. AWS/Azure/etc. hosting costs are peanuts compared to what most banks or other big enterprises pay for their internal hosting. On top of that, internal IT response times are frequently horrible. Any developer worth his pay generally loves cloud providers and abhors IT departments. They're slow to deploy hardware or VMs, update firewall rules, install software, etc.
    • vidarh 7y ago
      The main competition to AWS is not (or should not be) internal IT, but other cloud providers outside the big 2-3 (Digital Ocean etc.), and dedicated and managed hosting providers. I can usually get a server in less than 24h from a provider like Hetzner, but if I need capacity urgently I can also temporarily spin up cloud instances there. The biggest issue is not that people want to avoid internal IT and/or want elasticity, but the number of people who never even do a proper cost comparison beyond the top tier most expensive providers.
      • devonkim 7y ago
        AWS hasn't been selling itself as a competitor to other clouds for like a decade compared to in-house IT because their market entrance _is_ technology lagging companies. The first demo use cases for, say, SQS back to 2008 were literally failing over databases into the cloud. It wasn't really until Azure that any truly serious attempt to compete cloud to cloud at enterprise scale. For all the HN hype of all the various vendors out there, they're all small fries collectively compared to the many billions of the cloud gorillas like Alibaba, Azure, and AWS. DO, Linode, Vultr, etc. are simply not intended for bureaucracy-laden companies that are the lion's share of the global IT market and also are not even allowed under many enterprise vendor and purchasing agreements (had this problem with several customers' contracts / legal before that would have killed 7+ figure deals). Most places outside tech hubs put massive emphasis upon being able to swap labor and are technology laggards because their switching costs are so high due to lack of velocity in their work in technology in the first place (and also why waterfall or spiral makes more sense for their efforts rather than Agile probably even today). The irony here is that strong AWS professionals are not cheap in any way, but neither is being dead in the water because your 60+ year old guru graybeard IT guy that managed the racks faithfully for 12+ years retires suddenly.
• maayank 7y ago
  I use it when needing vast geographical spread - e.g. nodes that are closest to exchanges or some such. Because so many others use it, if you care about latency to the counter-party server it's often a nice way to ensure low latency (by using the same availability zone).
• peterwwillis 7y ago
  You get what you pay for. You can pay a lot of money and have almost no worries (and lots of free time), or pay a little money and have lots of worries (and no free time). And since the OP was talking about Kubernetes, and you're talking about "lock-in", another reason I love AWS is it is not a lock-in device. I can use any service of AWS's by itself, without being forced to use anything else or do something in a proprietary way. All the interfaces are a command-line or REST API with JSON data formats. They are all designed to operate by themselves, so you can provide replacement components at any time, hosted anywhere. On the other hand, you can't just use one part of K8s, because you have to at least set up and manage an entire cluster first. And there's dozens of services K8s simply does not have, and other hosting providers don't have.
  • vraivroo 7y ago
    Baloney. All the major clouds offer managed k8s. And using k8s in no way precludes you from integrating with services that are not on k8s (of course though, k8s can run anything you can containerize). So AWS has vastly more "lock-in" debt than k8s.
    • peterwwillis 7y ago
      To replace an AWS service, you just plug in a different service integration, or use a literal API complete clone. To replace the use of any part of K8s with something non-K8s, you basically have to replace all your use of anything in K8s. So the debt is much higher with k8s because it takes much more engineering work to get off it and it's not compatible with anything but itself. Furthermore, just because someone has a managed k8s doesn't make it less lock-in or less work. With AWS you don't need to use a cluster of anything. With k8s you are signing yourself up to tons of complex services and specific design and operation paradigms. With AWS you have no such inherent restrictions. K8s is inherently more complex and difficult to use than AWS services, which aren't even a good comparison because they are so simple by comparison.
  • darkwater 7y ago
    > You get what you pay for. You can pay a lot of money and have almost no worries (and lots of free time), or pay a little money and have lots of worries (and no free time). This is, in my experience, quite a false statement when talking about AWS. You are either a (team of) 10x engineer(s) capable of anything or as you grow in people and services you will need to use a good chunk of your developer time managing AWS, or hire a dedicated person (sysadmin).
• joana035 7y ago
  Yes, and this is sad. I have seen this as the outcome of a bubble which keeps repeating that "having to maintain is bad", "servers are bad" or "this is old".
  • wtf1234 7y ago
    AKA marketing.
• rumanator 7y ago
  > Why are people so obsessed by AWS? It is one of the most expensive hosting solutions that tries hard to lock you into their ecosystem. I agree with you, and that's why I try to get the point of view of those who actually decide to adopt AWS. They aren't crazy or stupid, and as AWS is the world's leading cloud provider then it's highly doubtful that the decision is irrational and motivated by ignorance. So far, the main fallacy with regards to companies picking AWS is that cost is relevant. It isn't. AWS might overcharge a lot, but truth of the matter is that for any sizeable corporation it's irrelevant if they spend 200€ or 400€ on their cloud infrastructure. It's far less than a salary and it's even less than the bill for some office utilities. So once the infrastructure foot is in the door then why would management worry about cost? What they do care about is uptime and development speed, because that has direct impact on productivity, and thus value extracted from salaries. If a particular service provider enables you to show tangible results in no time at all (see spin up a database or message broker or workflow in less than nothing) then they don't mind paying a premium that matches, say, their air conditioning bill.
  • Legogris 7y ago
    For a startup, it can work out like this: Start out on AWS/GCP/Azure in the initial phase when you want to optimize for velocity in terms of pushing out new functionality and services. When you start to require several message queues, different data stores, dynamic provisioning and high availability, you save a lot on setup and maintenance - the initial cost of getting your private own cloud up and running, and doing so stably, is not to be underestimated. Especially when you're still exploring and haven't figured out the best technologies for you long-term. Then, at some point, that dynamic changes as you have a better understanding of your needs, the bills start to build up and the architecture is in less flux. You might also have a bigger team and can afford to start allocating more resources to operation. That is the point when it it might make sense to migrate over to self-managed. Then at the same time, you have the scalability, which might be more of a key point for even larger organizations. I think building somewhat cloud-agnostic to ease friction of provider migration is good, regardless, but do so pragmatically and look at the APIs from a service perspective. Kubernetes? All the bigger providers have alternatives and you can run your own. Fargate? You're going to have to do some rewrites. MemoryStore? Just swap for your another Redis instance. BigTable? Highly GCP specific. etc. Not saying there aren't a lot of companies who choose the wrong provider for the wrong reasons, but it can also be part of a conscious strategy. Also nobody got fired for IBM and so on.
• Cthulhu_ 7y ago
  I wonder if a lot of startups think "What if we're an overnight success and we have to scale up fast?". This is of course what Amazon makes sure to use in their marketing as well. Examples: Twitter became far more successful than their architecture and infrastructure could handle back then. Pokemon Go became an insanely huge success far exceeding their worst case scenario. There's a postmortem/whitepaper on Google Cloud Engine about that IIRC.
  • zeristor 7y ago
    The white paper on Pokemon Go ramping up on GCP after launch: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/bringing-pokemon-go-to-life-on-google-cloud https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/bringing-pokemon-...
• js4ever 7y ago
  No one got fired for choosing AWS ... Nor blamed in case of outage because of AWS.
  • swypych 7y ago
    This. It's sad to say but people are not rewarded by going with a perceived riskier option in an effort to save a couple 100k. You go with what works and proven, and with what will make your life the easiest. If AWS goes down, then its much easier to explain why. If "Big Bill's Lowcost Cloud Solutions" provider goes down, then your entire judgement will be questioned. Even if Big Bill's Cloud solution is equally or more capable and only half the cost.
    • karatestomp 7y ago
      Yep, it's risk aversion at the individual level. Your solution you fought for breaks once? That's associated with you, personally. AWS breaks three times in the same time period, or ends up costing a ton more than expected, or whatever? Well it's an "industry standard" so no-one gets the blame, even if it gets bad enough that a change (how about Azure!) is initiated.
  • ksec 7y ago
    Exactly. Try telling your management to switch to DO or Linode, which is already the top spot for 2nd Tier Cloud Hosting. Who is there to take the risk of failing for saving that is in the grand scheme of things negligible. AWS failed? Great you have half of the internet down as well to cover your ass. No one get the blame and everyone continue with their work. Of course this depends on culture and regional reputation. For example you would have no problem if your Startup in France is using OVH.
    • pnutjam 7y ago
      Not sure about DO, but Linode will bounce your servers whenever they feel like it. They usually give notice.
  • altmind 7y ago
• dirtydroog 7y ago
  We moved to GCP from AWS because we thought it'd be cheaper. Turns out it wasn't that much cheaper at all. But Google paid for the transition so there's that...
• ldoughty 7y ago
  AWS can be expensive, but it comes down to engineering and needs. I'd argue it's most expensive for small (10-50 person... ish) businesses -- to small to hire a LOT of overhead staff, but not small enough that you're still in POC/MVP stage. A lot of ideas can be tested in AWS essentially free. However, if you pick the wrong tools or don't anticipate future bills, you can end up with additional costs and need to re-engineer slightly. That said, it works best with scalability concerned workloads. If you only need 10,000 machines for a few hours/days (research workloads), or your load is much heavier just 9-5pm, or you need vast constant scalability. My org currently has 19,500 VMs in AWS right now -- they are student VMs running a mix of OS's. While many of them are offline for days or weeks at a time, we can easily start 5,000 of them in a minute or two if needed (though we usually don't see more than 400/minute). Sure, we can run these in a large virtualization system of our own, but we're only 3 developers, a single system admin, and one cloud focused person (though we do cross train a lot)... So AWS allows us scale quickly without as much concern on the underlying architecture.. purchasing equipment... Dealing with hardware failures or warranty/replacement claims. We can spend our 9-5 building, improving, and optimizing the system (including reducing costs). With this setup, nearly anyone in our team has the capability to research a new component of we really want to add it (like websocket support) and play around (in a sandbox), without getting others involved until it is ready for a POC demo... Then we can have a new feature in production in days/weeks despite needing new equipment. All that said, I'm not a cloud-is-the-only-way evangelist... If you don't need any of that, you can fairly easily make a cloud agnostic system with container... Using ECS for many typical use cases is rather portable to other container systems. If your making larger lambda packages that can handle many paths (i.e. ELB/API Gateway Lambda proxy), they can move with less work than 100 purpose built functions. If argue most people unhappy with AWS have leadership with goals or ideas sold to them that are silly (lift and shift)... Or staff that are not trained on the cloud provider so they don't know the right considerations for building in the provider they pick. I'd wager many developers don't even know how to use Dynamo DB properly for the first year or two they use it. It's hard to say it's AWS's fault if you have a large bill because your developers 'SELECT * FROM users' every time you lookup a single user... and AWS scales to support the inefficient scan (how does a DB provider know if your application logic only uses one value?). Anyway, I hope this gives some insight on why orgs use AWS.
• k__ 7y ago
  I didn't have the impression people where choosing AWS for costs alone. What cloud provider has a similar feature set? Sure, if you want to meddle around with VMs and containers, you can use pretty much any provider, but if you want to go a step further there isn't much left
  • mekster 7y ago
    What's a popular feature set that only AWS can do and cannot easily roll your own solution?
• codegladiator 7y ago
  I used to get 18k monthly bill on AWS, moved everything to DO and now it costs me 8k a month. Billing is so much easier to understand now as well. It was k8s to k8s cluster transfer, so migration wasn't very painful.
  • vidarh 7y ago
    And even DO is still quite expensive (though the cheaper alternatives do tend to have limitations - e.g. if you're ok with Europe only Hetzner tends to be far cheaper, but that doesn't work for everyone).
    • codegladiator 7y ago
      Thanks but majority of the target audience is in SEA. Also we considered moving to DO only once they had their k8s offering ready. I might have missed it in the search, but seems Hetzner is probably still working on it. Nobody here like to deploy k8s although the tools to do that are super sexy these days.
      • vidarh 7y ago
        Hetzner deploys new features very slowly; that's the main issue with them if you're not prepared to roll your own. But certainly for SEA they don't make sense, unless you e.g. have any subsets of functionality that are bandwidth intensive but not latency insensitive (e.g. I used to manage a network that was split between UK, Germany and New Zealand, and we used Hetzner for the German footprint and put anything where latency didn't matter, like bulk e-mailing, there, while customer facing stuff was all in their respective country). For that to be worthwhile you need a quite significant volume though.
  • paulddraper 7y ago
    If you use k8s, you can shop around more easily. Of course, the flexibility of k8s does come with complexity, so YMMV.
  • shiftpgdn 7y ago
• Tehnix 7y ago
  Two main reasons: Elasticity and Availability. Our services are highly elastic, and can vary from processing 8 million events/day to 600 million events/day. Same as with our users, which are mainly active during work hours, with some running night shifts, and then fewer running weekends. We are probably the prime-case for cloud, since elasticity is where you save cost by going away from dedicated hosting. As for availability; our customers are highly dependant on us processing their data live, and them being able to monitor, get alarms and react on their data. They rely on us to notify whichever technician needs to fix their production line when it's stopped, since they loosing money for every minute the line is not running (true for almost any manufacturing company). This means that we need a lot of redundancy, and these things are built-in to almost all AWS offerings. -- There's a case for dedicated servers still, I'll agree on that, but we are definitely benefiting from the cloud.
  • einpoklum 7y ago
    I'm no cloud expert, but - I'm not sure your argument is convincing. Let's say that, for a unit of computing work, ,the cloud price is N times of non-cloud. I'm being a bit vague here for generality; plus, when not on a cloud, the cost structure is different, but bear with me. Ok. Now, your load varies by a factor of up to 133x. But unless your peak load is over N times your average, it is still cheaper for you to keep machines which support the peak load and have a bunch of idle time. Extra benefits: * Can do other computational work (e.g. experiments) during off hours without impacting system responsiveness. * Can perhaps put some machines to sleep, or other power-saving measures, during off hours. Extra detriments: * You have to take care of more system and cluster administration work than on the cloud. Above N, the cloud makes sense. Close to N - not sure. Well below N - doesn't seem to make sense. You'll need to tell us that N is low enough.
    • vidarh 7y ago
      My rule of thumb is that you need peaks shorter than ~6 hours for most "normal" type setups before AWS becomes viable from a cost perspective. Of course that depends on how significant the peaks are. Most consumer websites with an international audience for example, rarely have significant enough peaks. This is exacerbated because the alternative is not either-or - the most cost effective system is often dedicated hosting + the ability to spin up cloud instances to take the peaks. Doing so lets you provision your dedicated servers to run at much higher utilization most of the time, and make pure cloud setups look far more expensive, and most people with setups like that end up needing the cloud instances very rarely. That's not to say there aren't exceptions with genuinely massive peaks, but even then it doesn't take a huge base load before a hybrid system starts to have the potential to bring substantial savings.
• bitxbit 7y ago
  You can do a lot with lambda while keeping your costs down.
• papito 7y ago
  It's also a very common skill. A lot of people are familiar with AWS. What money you would save by using an alternative, you will lose on training new recruits, or mistakes made from lack of expertise.
  • mekster 7y ago
    Many of the knowledge works across other vendors that are just Linux. What AWS specific feature are people so desperate to use to get themselves locked up?
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• xtracto 7y ago
  Because it works? I was doing some testing of Serververless (the framework) for a personal project. I wanted to do it in Google functions + Database, but even for the basic out of the examples GCS wouldnt work; I spent 3 hours fiddling around. I moved on to AWS lambda + Dynamo and was done in 1 hour. Also AWS support is simply amazing. Considering Google history of bad support, I wouldnt consider it for anything serious.
  • paulddraper 7y ago
    > Also AWS support is simply amazing. A few weeks ago, I had a two-node Elasticsearch cluster (evidently my mistake...though IDK why AWS can operate high availability two-node transaction RDS clusters no problem but not ES). One node went down, only manual intervention by AWS support could fix it, automatic backups were completely inaccessible (since they rely on the cluster being up? ... WTF), and it took many hours for support to reset the cluster. I eventually just "screw it," and spent a couple rebuilding the cluster from scratch.
    • goatherders 7y ago
      This. AWS support is wildly expensive. I actually encourage most companies to find a smaller partner with strong infrastructure for this exact reason.
      • andrew_wc_brown 7y ago
        AWS Business Support is only $100 / USD per month where you can call in 24/7 and be connected with a Cloud Support Engineer within 5-15 mins. If you don't like the engineer, hang up call again and get someone different. That's incredibly in-expensive, saves me hours or hiring more devs. You can get this Business Support for free a year if you join StartupSchool and get 3K USD credits with the business support. If you can't afford it, maybe you are just hobbying around but AWS offers lots of ways to support you until you have a substainable revenue.
        • goatherders 7y ago
• vorpalhex 7y ago
  If you need a few servers, then yeah, AWS is super pricey and locked in. If you need 50 engineers to be able to manage 200ish servers, well, uh, you just don't have a ton of options. Obviously not everyone falls into that second category but plenty do.
  • snark42 7y ago
    > If you need 50 engineers to be able to manage 200ish servers, well, uh, you just don't have a ton of options. Who needs 50 engineers for 200 servers? My IT team manages 750 servers in 5 co-locations + 200 end users + DBA responsibilities with 5. If we grow above 1000 we might need to hire a 6th.
• CSDude 7y ago
  Because AWS is not just server hosting company.
• meddlepal 7y ago
  Two reasons come to mind: 1. Nobody gets fired for picking AWS. 2. Plentiful amount of talent that understands AWS and AWS patterns.
• gigatexal 7y ago
  Nobody ever got fire from buying IB ... er AWS. [1] [1] until the bill shows up ;-) Actually -- to be honest, we're in the golden age of infrastructure. I love building on cloud. I don't have to worry about the fiddly bits as much and when I do things are often documented either in official docs or in blog posts and things.
  • whatsmyusername 7y ago
    IBM was the 90s. The 2000s was VMWare.
• numbsafari 7y ago
  We do it because those alt vendors don’t have the security or compliance options offered by AWS/GCP/Azure. For example, I wanted to replicate GCS to another hosted block store so that we could have a backup of our systems outside of our GCP account (they have been known to lock accounts on small businesses and not be very helpful in fixing it, GCS itself has been as stable as S3 in my experience). Anyhow, I really wanted to use Backblaze B2 service for this purpose. Unfortunately, they don’t have the kinds of security controls or third party audits our industry requires, and their sales team indicated it wasn’t on the roadmap. I appreciate that honesty, but it’s one more reason the major players have a leg up. They amortize the cost of compliance to the point where you don’t see it. For a long time AWS charged a lot extra for it, but GCP did not and was cheaper anyway. Now AWS gives compliance away for “free” as well. It often leaves me wondering about other startups... how secure are they, really? I know my industry is onerous, but a lot of it is just “common sense” security-wise. Why should my browsing history or e-commerce purchases be any different from my medical records, when there are ways to use former to reverse engineer the latter?
• krick 7y ago
  What do you suggest instead of AWS?
• StreamBright 7y ago
  I am not sure they are obsessed with AWS. I think they are obsessed with scalability (both technical and financial), elasticity (turning off capacity that you do not use), security compliance (required by many industries), reliability, availability, and support in case something goes sideways. Containers and Linux are orthogonal to this.
• hinkley 7y ago
  i have absolutely no idea how much my company is paying for AWS. I expect I will soon, but it’s a little alarming that this data is not readily available to me. I think I am not the only one in that boat. For people who know very well? I think it’s not unlike interpersonal dynamics. Codependency looks very different from outside versus inside. It’s difficult to tell why your friend keeps investing in this bozo, coming up with ever more elaborate ways to manage them and their moods. And over lunch a mutual friend will discuss how they might be better off with someone else, and once in a great while someone will ask if maybe So-and-so might not be better off alone. AWS is a dishonest partner. They have decided that you not knowing how much this is going to cost you is a good thing, and give no evidence that they are willing to change. This is who they are. Do the good things about them make up for that kind of bad thing? I don’t think so. I think you should look for another partner. Maybe just something light, not a serious relationship. Or maybe try some alone time and see what that’s like.
• NicoJuicy 7y ago
  According to what think: accounting. The bill of the cloud vendor is already approved and the 3rd party apps don't need to have a seperate approval process.
• stjohnswarts 7y ago
  I think it's probably the new "no one got fired for buying IBM"
• whatsmyusername 7y ago
  You'll never get fired for suggesting AWS. And IAM is the killer feature.
• chundicus 7y ago
  Here's my two cents as a developer who has only paid the cost of AWS once for a one-off project (in retrospect I could've gotten more value with similar processing power with a different service). AWS is established and relatively straightforward. I found the user experience to be pretty seamless. Maybe there are better alternatives but I've found Google Cloud Platform and IBM Cloud to be absolutely miserable and confusing (the latter more so).WRT Google Cloud Platform I think the main sin is the UI/UX, and if I had to foot the bill I would give them another consideration. I had very limited (but good) experience with DigitalOcean and Heroku, but those just don't have the infrastructure at scale to compete with AWS in my opinion. What do you think is the best alternative to AWS?
• notyourday 7y ago
  Because fundamentally there are tiers of service that one need to use: There's a critical core infrastructure - i would argue that it is: * some sort of centralized management platform even if platform is just a set of deploy scripts ( 1 instance ), * Origin DNS servers ( 3 instances - one per AZ) * HTTP/HTTPS entry points ( 3 instances - one per AZ) , * A couple of database servers ( say primary and a backup 2 - instances ). * I would add job server though it probably could be collapsed into the management platform. You need to have fixed IP addresses for this ( you really do not want to deal with service discovery at this level ) and you want it to be at a provider that won't ever make you need to renumber, or preferably a provider that does not ever break fundamental things like IP address assignment, or a provider that would run out of resources. One's "internet presence" disappears when this dies. Running all of this as a core workload on AWS/GCP/Azure is a no brainier - it will cost about $100/mo, be nearly insta-rebuildable and re-deployable and a couple configuration files in git would take care of bringing up the beach head up. At this point your core is up and everything else becomes service specific. This is the point where costs become a consideration but drive to low cost should not come at the expense of tooling. If by embracing ephemeral resources and existing tooling one can cut the base AWS/GCP/Azure price down by 80% most people would think it is a win over having to invest into building tooling to make containers stable ( as in always behave in a predictable manner ) on a provider that can shave off 95% of the costs. The biggest issues with the cloud providers is the cost of IO and cost of bandwidth which scales linearly with the workload but that's an issue for very specific subset of customers that should be hiring real ops people.
• danudey 7y ago
  > if you have someone with sysadmin/devops skills, it is easily doable. And if you don't, AWS can be pretty cost-competitive because your developers can handle a lot of the "infrastructure" that you used to need a dedicated sysadmin (or a team of) to handle. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't likely spend my own money on them, but it does beat having to try to find an on-call infrastructure person and a reliable data centre with proper routes, and then developers/devops people who can scale, monitor, manage, and maintain queueing services, message gateways, object storage, databases, firewalls, load balancers, containers, VMs, network attached storage, etc. Also, don't underestimate the value of things like CloudFormation. Being able to make an API call and have an entire cluster configured, with load balancing, backups, multi-AZ redundancy, CDNs, etc., is pretty potent. AWS might be expensive, but it gives you access to a lot of things that you might not otherwise have, even if you do have a sysadmin/devops guy.
• manigandham 7y ago
  It's all relative. For most businesses, productivity is more important than the cost of infrastructure because it creates more revenue to cover the cost, leading to a net profit. That being said, it also makes sense to apply some basic optimizations to reduce costs by a significant margin, as long as the work involved in optimizing pays off. A few days to cut costs by 50% makes sense, a few months to save a few dollars doesnt.