4 ms·

IMO, the cloud providers' main advantage is that they will professionally manage all of the underlying hardware. Optionally, they can also manage the low level

IMO, the cloud providers' main advantage is that they will professionally manage all of the underlying hardware. Optionally, they can also manage the low level pieces of software also (e.g. databases, file store, etc.). It's a safe bet that GCP, AWS, Azure et al. can manage/architect their data center much better than the vast majority of companies.

toyg 6y ago
The last point is something that “we”, as an industry, can often be blind to. If your business is something that is fundamentally not “pushing bytes”, you really, really don’t want to know about routers, firewalls, the OSI layer, SHA256, RAID arrays, all the way to this week’s JS framework. All of that is a big annoyance, and paying AWS to “take care of it” makes sense, even if it comes at a higher price: more often than not, the difference wouldn’t be offset by the time, effort, and risk exposure that you would have to allocate when building your own. This calculation is different if your business is primarily digital. The gentleman upthread making a game, for example, is perfectly right: his company naturally developed a culture that can evaluate and manage every aspect of its digital operations, because it’s part of its core business, so it makes sense to put that knowledge to good use and save money.
- kortilla 6y ago
  But if you’re incompetent to that degree, AWS isn’t for you because you can’t even write software to run on it. You should be using a fully managed SaaS at that point.
  - toyg 6y ago
    In many cases yes, but there are shades of grey. Some systems cannot be shared, for whatever reason.
  - twic 6y ago
    There are three things that make sense to me. Firstly, if you are big enough, you can manage/architect your data centre better than a cloud provider. You can afford to hire staff to do it, and they can build something specific to your needs. Companies like this should be on-prem. (It doesn't matter if the company is "digital" or not. It could be a huge retail chain, or a government agency, whatever. The only requirement is to be big enough that you have big needs and can afford a big spend on staff.) Secondly, if you are small enough, you really, really don’t want to know about routers, firewalls, the OSI layer, SHA256, RAID arrays, etc. Dealing with that would mean another couple of full-time employees, and you can't afford that. Companies like this should be on a SaaS (ideally one less full of gotchas than Heroku). Thirdly, if you are in between, you have the capacity to deal with system administration, there are some advantages to being able to shape your infrastructure to your needs, but you really don't want to get into real estate and millions of dollars of CAPEX. Companies like this should be on rented physical hardware. What doesn't make sense, at any scale, is renting VMs.
    - bravura 6y ago
      Do you mean PaaS, not SaaS? What other good PaaS exist besides heroku?
      - twic 6y ago
        I did mean PaaS, not Saas! Apologies, and thank you! I wish i had a good answer about PaaS. There are hosted Cloud Foundry services. I think CF is more sensible than Heroku, myself. The various serverless platforms are PaaS of a specific kind. I think SalesForce counts. Is OpenShift still a thing?
    - mwcampbell 6y ago
      > What doesn't make sense, at any scale, is renting VMs. I disagree. The big cloud providers will let you rent VMs across multiple availability zones in a single geographic region. That gives you better redundancy than you could get by renting one or more dedicated servers in a single data center. Yes, those same cloud providers offer bare-metal instances, but those are absurdly expensive for a company that only needs small-scale computing power but still cares about uptime.
      - twic 6y ago
        If you're small, you can get that redundancy on a PaaS. If you're big enough to move off a PaaS, you can rent physical machines in multiple datacentres.
        mwcampbell 6y ago
        Size is not the only thing that dictates whether one should use a PaaS. It's entirely possible for a tiny generalist team, or even a single developer, to develop an application whose requirements prevent it from running on a PaaS. But that doesn't mean the team or solo developer should have to handle all the hassles of operating physical servers. (Source: I was that solo developer for many years.)
    - TheColorYellow 6y ago
kenhwang 6y ago
The cloud providers' main advantage when you're unicorn scale is their engineering team acts as an extension of yours. We regularly hop on calls with AWS to scope out features for them to build for us. Our parent org can pretty much snap their fingers and Google will dispatch their engineers to fix/build whatever they wanted. That and very preferential pricing.

toyg 6y ago

The last point is something that “we”, as an industry, can often be blind to. If your business is something that is fundamentally not “pushing bytes”, you really, really don’t want to know about routers, firewalls, the OSI layer, SHA256, RAID arrays, all the way to this week’s JS framework. All of that is a big annoyance, and paying AWS to “take care of it” makes sense, even if it comes at a higher price: more often than not, the difference wouldn’t be offset by the time, effort, and risk exposure that you would have to allocate when building your own. This calculation is different if your business is primarily digital. The gentleman upthread making a game, for example, is perfectly right: his company naturally developed a culture that can evaluate and manage every aspect of its digital operations, because it’s part of its core business, so it makes sense to put that knowledge to good use and save money.

kortilla 6y ago
But if you’re incompetent to that degree, AWS isn’t for you because you can’t even write software to run on it. You should be using a fully managed SaaS at that point.
- toyg 6y ago
  In many cases yes, but there are shades of grey. Some systems cannot be shared, for whatever reason.
- twic 6y ago
  There are three things that make sense to me. Firstly, if you are big enough, you can manage/architect your data centre better than a cloud provider. You can afford to hire staff to do it, and they can build something specific to your needs. Companies like this should be on-prem. (It doesn't matter if the company is "digital" or not. It could be a huge retail chain, or a government agency, whatever. The only requirement is to be big enough that you have big needs and can afford a big spend on staff.) Secondly, if you are small enough, you really, really don’t want to know about routers, firewalls, the OSI layer, SHA256, RAID arrays, etc. Dealing with that would mean another couple of full-time employees, and you can't afford that. Companies like this should be on a SaaS (ideally one less full of gotchas than Heroku). Thirdly, if you are in between, you have the capacity to deal with system administration, there are some advantages to being able to shape your infrastructure to your needs, but you really don't want to get into real estate and millions of dollars of CAPEX. Companies like this should be on rented physical hardware. What doesn't make sense, at any scale, is renting VMs.
  - bravura 6y ago
    Do you mean PaaS, not SaaS? What other good PaaS exist besides heroku?
    - twic 6y ago
      I did mean PaaS, not Saas! Apologies, and thank you! I wish i had a good answer about PaaS. There are hosted Cloud Foundry services. I think CF is more sensible than Heroku, myself. The various serverless platforms are PaaS of a specific kind. I think SalesForce counts. Is OpenShift still a thing?
  - mwcampbell 6y ago
    > What doesn't make sense, at any scale, is renting VMs. I disagree. The big cloud providers will let you rent VMs across multiple availability zones in a single geographic region. That gives you better redundancy than you could get by renting one or more dedicated servers in a single data center. Yes, those same cloud providers offer bare-metal instances, but those are absurdly expensive for a company that only needs small-scale computing power but still cares about uptime.
    - twic 6y ago
      If you're small, you can get that redundancy on a PaaS. If you're big enough to move off a PaaS, you can rent physical machines in multiple datacentres.
      - mwcampbell 6y ago
        Size is not the only thing that dictates whether one should use a PaaS. It's entirely possible for a tiny generalist team, or even a single developer, to develop an application whose requirements prevent it from running on a PaaS. But that doesn't mean the team or solo developer should have to handle all the hassles of operating physical servers. (Source: I was that solo developer for many years.)
  - TheColorYellow 6y ago

kenhwang 6y ago

The cloud providers' main advantage when you're unicorn scale is their engineering team acts as an extension of yours. We regularly hop on calls with AWS to scope out features for them to build for us. Our parent org can pretty much snap their fingers and Google will dispatch their engineers to fix/build whatever they wanted. That and very preferential pricing.