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Like I said on another site: ... people know AWS and know how to be productive with the services and frameworks for AWS. that alone is a figure hard to quantif

Like I said on another site: ... people know AWS and know how to be productive with the services and frameworks for AWS. that alone is a figure hard to quantify. Sure I could save money bringing all the servers back internally or using cheaper datacenters, but I worked at a company that worked that way. You end up doing a lot of busy work chucking bad drives, making tickets to the infrastructure group and waiting for the UNIX Admin group to add more storage to your server. WIth AWS I can reasonably assume I can spin up as many c5.12xlarge machines as I want, whenever I want with whatever extras I want. It costs an 1/8 of a million a year, roughly. I see that 1/8 of a million that cuts out a lot of busy work I don’t care about doing and an 1/8 of a million that simplifies finding people to do the remaining work I don’t care about doing. The author says money wasted, I see it as money spent so i don’t have to care, and not caring is something I like; hell it isn’t even my money.

varispeed 6y ago
I had this mindset for a long time that we would save money running our own infrastructure. I remember talking days with our CTO about getting dedicated servers and spinning up one of the Citrix or VMWare offerings. I was sure that we could run our backend on one dedicated server for a fraction of the equivalent on AWS. I based my assumptions on running my own infrastructure for years without issues. However, once we started growing I understood that adding resources, changing network policies, spinning test environments would be extremely difficult and would stall our growth. I am so glad they didn't listen to me.
- crisper78 6y ago
  You just didn't have anyone skilled enough to automate those things, or you couldn't manage that. If you are colo you aren't swapping disks/network your colo provider is. Im not advocating for doing it ALL yourself, making network cables does save money, but its impractical. Just because you couldn't manage the whole thing while having the ear of the CTO, just means you failed it doesn't mean it doesn't work for lots of other companies that make lots of money.

varispeed 6y ago

I had this mindset for a long time that we would save money running our own infrastructure. I remember talking days with our CTO about getting dedicated servers and spinning up one of the Citrix or VMWare offerings. I was sure that we could run our backend on one dedicated server for a fraction of the equivalent on AWS. I based my assumptions on running my own infrastructure for years without issues. However, once we started growing I understood that adding resources, changing network policies, spinning test environments would be extremely difficult and would stall our growth. I am so glad they didn't listen to me.

crisper78 6y ago
You just didn't have anyone skilled enough to automate those things, or you couldn't manage that. If you are colo you aren't swapping disks/network your colo provider is. Im not advocating for doing it ALL yourself, making network cables does save money, but its impractical. Just because you couldn't manage the whole thing while having the ear of the CTO, just means you failed it doesn't mean it doesn't work for lots of other companies that make lots of money.