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"Cheaper than cost of being down." This is very insightful. Many of us look at the cost of multi zone deployments and cringe, but its a mathematics exercise.
by campnic 15y ago
"Cheaper than cost of being down."
This is very insightful. Many of us look at the cost of multi zone deployments and cringe, but its a mathematics exercise.
(.05 * hours in a year)*(cost of being down per hour) = (expected cost of single zone availability).
Now just compare to 2-3x your single zone deployment cost. Don't forget the cost of being down per hour should include lost customers as well.
- jedberg 15y agoAt their level of income, this is true. For us, we are just now staffing up to the level where we can make the changes necessary to do the same thing.
- Goladus 15y agoI would also be shocked if Amazon isn't giving Netflix preferred pricing because it's such a high-profile customer.
- adrianco 15y agoNetflix pays standard rates for instances but uses reserved instances to pay less on bulk EC2 deployments
- adrianco 15y agoI think it's incredible that you guys can run a site at all with the few people you've got. Hope it all gets better again soon.
- redthrowaway 15y agoAre you looking to diversify across ebs or set up dedicated hosting?
- darrenkopp 15y agoAlso, when there are service interruptions, they send out credits to customers.
- xsmasher 15y agoIt's a strange algebra though; doesn't it mean the WORSE Amazon's uptime is, the more money you should give them?
- misterbwong 15y agoMore accurately, the more unstable your infrastructure is, the more you will need to spend to ensure stability.
- rickmode 15y agoSpending more on AWS to increase reliability isn't necessarily a benefit to Amazon. The increased costs can them less competative.
- nateberkopec 15y agoEvery decision in a business is like this - measure the cost of action A versus the cost of not-A. It's just rare that in this case, those costs are easily quantifiable.
- dfranke 15y agoI'm actually surprised if incurring 50% extra hardware costs really is cheaper than the cost of being down. If Netflix is down for a few hours, then it costs them some goodwill, and maybe a few new signups, but is the immediate revenue impact really that great? Most of Netflix's revenue comes from monthly subscriptions, and it's not like their customers have an SLA.
- awj 15y agoI'd imagine that part of this cost is reputation. The only problem I have ever had with Netflix streaming is when an agreement runs out and the pull something I or my wife regularly watch. (looking at you, "Paint Your Wagon") I have not had a single service issue with them, ever. They do a better job at reliably providing me with TV shows than the cable company does. That seems to be where they're looking to position themselves, and the reputation for always being there is hard to regain if you lose it.
- hoop 15y agoI don't think the cost of expanding to other regions/AZs is necessarily linear such that adding a zone would incur 50% more costs. Going from one zone to two would probably look that way (or even one server to two), but when you start going from two to three or even 10 to 11 then the %change-in-cost starts to decrease. This is even more true if/when you load balance between zones and aren't just using them as hot backups. As another commenter pointed out, Netflix says they have three zones and only need two to operate.
- brianpan 15y agoObviously you haven't been around my wife when she loses the last 5 minutes of a show. SLA or no, services will get cancelled.
- imajes 15y agoActually, they do. and Netflix proactively refund customers for downtime. Usually it's pennies on the dollar, but i've had more than refund for sub 30 minute outages which have prohibited me from using the service. Netflix are very very sensitive to this problem because it's much harder for them to sell against their biggest competitor (local cable) since they rely on the cable to deliver their service. If the service goes down, then the cable company can jump in and say, "You'll never lose the signal on our network" -- blatantly untrue, but it doesn't matter. When you're disrupting a market, remember that what seem trivial is in fact hugely important when you're fighting huge well-established competition :)