4 ms·

My startup runs and operates on AWS, and we were able to get off the ground with a tiny little team within days — something that would have once taken a large t

by bhupy 6y ago

My startup runs and operates on AWS, and we were able to get off the ground with a tiny little team within days — something that would have once taken a large team of engineers and business development folks weeks or months. I like to joke with my friends that AWS is responsible for the greatest second-order GDP growth on the planet, if you add up all of the market caps of all companies that have been able to build off of AWS (or their competitors). Rivaled only by MS Excel, as far as I'm concerned.

Aperocky 6y ago
I have multiple static website hosted by AWS, cost me only a few dollar a month as it's cloud native and does not need a box. Major upgrade from older hosting and scales very well if they ever need it.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
93po 6y ago
Isn't this more from the entire ecosystem of web hosting? In terms of basic hosting needs AWS doesn't do much uniquely that allows for tiny teams to do their job.
- Person5478 6y ago
  yeah, that was my thought too. I can literally pay for a $5 VPS and get off the ground in mere weeks as well. The only thing I don't get is the potential performance of AWS, but you have to pay extra for that at AWS as well, so paying extra outside of AWS for it isn't outlandish. Now, AWS has a lot of value addons that can make it worth it/useful, so perhaps there's a point there but it's not nearly as noteworthy as the other poster is making it seem.
- bhupy 6y ago
  No, it's way more than that. 10 years ago, I worked at a fairly well known tech company with 500+ employees. 1. We had an in house production engineering team, manage our own BGP and PoP points. 2. As we started to scale, we required active-active replication across multiple datacenters with high SLA requirements, which spawned a year-long project with multiple engineers to build in-house. 3. As the team grew, we required some sort of pub/sub system to enable cross-service communication — which spawned a year long project with a handful of engineers to build in-house. 4. We had to deploy our own load balancers in our datacenters and ensure that they scaled as we grew. Today, my tiny little team has access to tooling that enables pretty much everything I described above for a low monthly price. Elastic load balancer gave us (4) right out of the box, RDS (or Dynamo) gave us (2) right out of the box, SQS + SNS gives us (3) right out of the box. Within the AWS VPC in us-east-1, we hardly ever think about (1). Today, we just had a need to do OCR (optical character recognition) of receipts because it was becoming untenable to have humans read every single on of them. Once upon a time, that would have been its own big engineering workstream. Instead, we had an intern integrate with AWS Textract (https://aws.amazon.com/textract/ https://aws.amazon.com/textract/) and called it a day. These anecdotes just scratch the surface; if you go on https://aws.amazon.com/ https://aws.amazon.com/, every single one of those products were once months-to-years-long multi-engineer projects that had to happen in-house at every tech company as recently as 2012. The sheer breadth of what AWS allows startups with limited resources to do just can't be understated, and as a startup employee myself, I appreciate that first-hand.
  - 93po 6y ago
    >In terms of basic hosting needs I'm glad it's been useful for you though.
  - rramadass 6y ago
    Can you recommend some resources (Books/Articles/Websites/etc.) which explain usage of all/most of the AWS offerings to do stuff as you have done?
    - MattSayar 6y ago
      In case you wanted a quick-and-dirty explanation of everything AWS has to offer https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/ https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/
      - rramadass 6y ago
        Thank you, that is a nice summary.
simonebrunozzi 6y ago
> Rivaled only by MS Excel Up until this point, I thought you were simply right (also: worked at AWS 2008-2014 and have a specific perspective on why I think you're right). Then, when you mentioned MS Excel, I thought: brilliant. Simply brilliant. I feel I'm one of the few that sees MS Excel as the biggest software winner of the past 40 years. So when I see someone that thinks like me, I rejoice.
- bhupy 6y ago
  Nice to know I’m not the only one :). > worked at AWS 2008-2014 and have a specific perspective on why I think you're right Would you be able to talk about this? I’m curious.
  - simonebrunozzi 6y ago
    Many things can't be said publicly. But here, publicly, I can say that AWS is certainly the lesser of two evils, in relation to choosing your IT Infrastructure provider. Doesn't mean you have to be 100% running on AWS; but there's almost always a decent double digit percentage of workloads that you can wisely move to AWS.

by bhupy 6y ago

Aperocky 6y ago

I have multiple static website hosted by AWS, cost me only a few dollar a month as it's cloud native and does not need a box. Major upgrade from older hosting and scales very well if they ever need it.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

93po 6y ago

Isn't this more from the entire ecosystem of web hosting? In terms of basic hosting needs AWS doesn't do much uniquely that allows for tiny teams to do their job.

Person5478 6y ago
yeah, that was my thought too. I can literally pay for a $5 VPS and get off the ground in mere weeks as well. The only thing I don't get is the potential performance of AWS, but you have to pay extra for that at AWS as well, so paying extra outside of AWS for it isn't outlandish. Now, AWS has a lot of value addons that can make it worth it/useful, so perhaps there's a point there but it's not nearly as noteworthy as the other poster is making it seem.
bhupy 6y ago
No, it's way more than that. 10 years ago, I worked at a fairly well known tech company with 500+ employees. 1. We had an in house production engineering team, manage our own BGP and PoP points. 2. As we started to scale, we required active-active replication across multiple datacenters with high SLA requirements, which spawned a year-long project with multiple engineers to build in-house. 3. As the team grew, we required some sort of pub/sub system to enable cross-service communication — which spawned a year long project with a handful of engineers to build in-house. 4. We had to deploy our own load balancers in our datacenters and ensure that they scaled as we grew. Today, my tiny little team has access to tooling that enables pretty much everything I described above for a low monthly price. Elastic load balancer gave us (4) right out of the box, RDS (or Dynamo) gave us (2) right out of the box, SQS + SNS gives us (3) right out of the box. Within the AWS VPC in us-east-1, we hardly ever think about (1). Today, we just had a need to do OCR (optical character recognition) of receipts because it was becoming untenable to have humans read every single on of them. Once upon a time, that would have been its own big engineering workstream. Instead, we had an intern integrate with AWS Textract (https://aws.amazon.com/textract/ https://aws.amazon.com/textract/) and called it a day. These anecdotes just scratch the surface; if you go on https://aws.amazon.com/ https://aws.amazon.com/, every single one of those products were once months-to-years-long multi-engineer projects that had to happen in-house at every tech company as recently as 2012. The sheer breadth of what AWS allows startups with limited resources to do just can't be understated, and as a startup employee myself, I appreciate that first-hand.
- 93po 6y ago
  >In terms of basic hosting needs I'm glad it's been useful for you though.
- rramadass 6y ago
  Can you recommend some resources (Books/Articles/Websites/etc.) which explain usage of all/most of the AWS offerings to do stuff as you have done?
  - MattSayar 6y ago
    In case you wanted a quick-and-dirty explanation of everything AWS has to offer https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/ https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/
    - rramadass 6y ago
      Thank you, that is a nice summary.

simonebrunozzi 6y ago

> Rivaled only by MS Excel Up until this point, I thought you were simply right (also: worked at AWS 2008-2014 and have a specific perspective on why I think you're right). Then, when you mentioned MS Excel, I thought: brilliant. Simply brilliant. I feel I'm one of the few that sees MS Excel as the biggest software winner of the past 40 years. So when I see someone that thinks like me, I rejoice.

bhupy 6y ago
Nice to know I’m not the only one :). > worked at AWS 2008-2014 and have a specific perspective on why I think you're right Would you be able to talk about this? I’m curious.
- simonebrunozzi 6y ago
  Many things can't be said publicly. But here, publicly, I can say that AWS is certainly the lesser of two evils, in relation to choosing your IT Infrastructure provider. Doesn't mean you have to be 100% running on AWS; but there's almost always a decent double digit percentage of workloads that you can wisely move to AWS.