3 ms·

> it becomes a long term loss in terms of ongoing operational costs. Based on what, that sounds like something you have just pulled out of the air.

dannyw 6y ago
AWS bandwidth costs, even with their volume pricing tiers, are >10x as much as you'd pay than if you'd bought it directly. On a small enough scale, it doesn't matter so much. When you're paying millions a month, it matters a huge deal. Even on a micro scale: * Vultr, DigitalOcean are 2-4x cheaper than AWS (and they are established companies with a track record of reliability, as well as 20+ locations around the world) * Even AWS offers "Lightsail" which are significantly discounted VPSes with included bandwidth that costs more than the Lightsail price! Their ToS prevents you from using it as proxies... lol. * Want to save money on S3? Get some colo space, buy some Enterprise HDDs and set it up on RAID, and your opex is going to be 5-10% the cost of S3. Or SSDs if your access patterns require it. Set up some SMART-based email alerts and an offsite backup procedure, and it's absolutely reliable enough for the vast majority of business use cases. P.S. even S3 silently loses files... * Using CloudFront? It might be easy and integrated, but it's absolutely not going to be the cheapest or best value. It's really marked up, heavily. Spend a few hours talking to leading competitors and you'll get a quote for half your CloudFront bill, if not less; often for a better CDN. * Trying AWS Rekognition, or other ML-as-a-service products? Hire some data science intern and they can copy/paste the leading open source project from GitHub, train it on your data, and you'll quite possibly get better results than generic ML solutions... for as low as 1/100th the cost. (Real example). Yes, you gotta maintain it, but I find that people generally think maintenance is a bigger monster than it actually is. AWS has huge profit margins: where do you think it comes from? Hint: it makes it from you.
blackrock 6y ago
Why rent, when you can buy? If you’re spending $100k per year on cloud services, then in 10 years, you’ll have spent $1 million. How many software licenses and hardware can you buy for that? Granted, some services are only online, so you’re at the mercy of your provider on what they want to charge.

dannyw 6y ago

AWS bandwidth costs, even with their volume pricing tiers, are >10x as much as you'd pay than if you'd bought it directly. On a small enough scale, it doesn't matter so much. When you're paying millions a month, it matters a huge deal. Even on a micro scale: * Vultr, DigitalOcean are 2-4x cheaper than AWS (and they are established companies with a track record of reliability, as well as 20+ locations around the world) * Even AWS offers "Lightsail" which are significantly discounted VPSes with included bandwidth that costs more than the Lightsail price! Their ToS prevents you from using it as proxies... lol. * Want to save money on S3? Get some colo space, buy some Enterprise HDDs and set it up on RAID, and your opex is going to be 5-10% the cost of S3. Or SSDs if your access patterns require it. Set up some SMART-based email alerts and an offsite backup procedure, and it's absolutely reliable enough for the vast majority of business use cases. P.S. even S3 silently loses files... * Using CloudFront? It might be easy and integrated, but it's absolutely not going to be the cheapest or best value. It's really marked up, heavily. Spend a few hours talking to leading competitors and you'll get a quote for half your CloudFront bill, if not less; often for a better CDN. * Trying AWS Rekognition, or other ML-as-a-service products? Hire some data science intern and they can copy/paste the leading open source project from GitHub, train it on your data, and you'll quite possibly get better results than generic ML solutions... for as low as 1/100th the cost. (Real example). Yes, you gotta maintain it, but I find that people generally think maintenance is a bigger monster than it actually is. AWS has huge profit margins: where do you think it comes from? Hint: it makes it from you.

blackrock 6y ago

Why rent, when you can buy? If you’re spending $100k per year on cloud services, then in 10 years, you’ll have spent $1 million. How many software licenses and hardware can you buy for that? Granted, some services are only online, so you’re at the mercy of your provider on what they want to charge.