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If you base your product on locked in services you are at the mercy of those services. Once you scale you will no longer afford to use AWS and have to colocate

If you base your product on locked in services you are at the mercy of those services. Once you scale you will no longer afford to use AWS and have to colocate your own hardware, along with entirely reimplementing your stack to use open source software. Not every startup is a billion "forever" funded project like Imgur or Twitter that can throw money in a hole and not care. Lots of smaller companies are coming to terms with having to shun away cloud services and rely on "the old ways", because it's the only affordable and scalable option. AWS is for privledged companies playing with silicon valley monopoly money based on made up "evaluations", most people don't have that benefit.

nemothekid 6y ago
>Once you scale you will no longer afford to use AWS and have to colocate your own hardware, along with entirely reimplementing your stack to use open source software. More companies are moving to the cloud from managed colo than the inverse. For example, companies like Uber and Adobe has been moving from their own datacenters to AWS. Even dinosaurs like Disney have moved to the cloud. Anyone who saves a significant amount of money running their own DCs vs uses the cloud either has significant security requirements or is the in the business of selling infrastructure (ex. Dropbox)
- libria 6y ago
  And even for those "dinosaurs" that are persnickety about control, Outposts allows them to house the rack onsite while still being managed by the AWS console. On on-premise cloud, if you will.
deanCommie 6y ago
I see it slightly differently. For most of the history of our industry, companies were penny-wise but pound-foolish. And I don't mean non technical leadership here, I include the developers themselves. (I'll spend 2 weeks to automate a tasks that takes 10 minutes to do manually once a week) Everyone is waking up to the "total cost" of software development. Market forces are forcing people to realize that developer time is the most valuable commodity there is. Companies don't go to the cloud because they have silicon valley money to burn. They go to the cloud because every minute of their developer time that is not spent on development operations and maintainance of code that a cloud provider offers instead, is a minute they can spend on the core UNIQUE business proposition of the company. You can bemoan the skills lost in our industry, but that always happened at every layer of abstraction in every technical industry.
ChicagoDave 6y ago
AWS is dirt cheap and many small and mid-range companies use their platform. If you architect things properly, you can get away with pennies on the dollar. Not every platform needs EC2 instances. Most can build on Lambdas, API Gateway, and S3. Not sure what evidence supports this notion of billions and privilege. If anything, AWS has democratized entrepreneurial endeavors.
- pas 6y ago
  AWS is not dirt cheap. It has a great value proposition in case people have a lot more money than time/expertise/etc. (So usually for one-man army startups, or startups with unlimited VC funds that want "hypergrowth", and for very high-margin high-growth/high-volume businesses where they can make a special deal with AWS, that is Netflix.) > If anything, AWS has democratized entrepreneurial endeavors. More likely AWS simply made a lot of money on the race to the bottom (or top) with regards to an ever faster, fatter, fancier and shinier Web. (Now everyone needs a CDN, everyone needs many PoPs, because the market forces demand this. Of course the total costs are enormous, but due to the increased scale and decades of technological changes the unit costs have gone down.) > Most can build on Lambdas, API Gateway, and S3. Sure, and it's great if people are aware of what kind of workload to put where. And if they build in rate limits. Otherwise they will be surprised when they run into the classic gotchas of "how we burnt all of our seed money on AWS bills".
- devwastaken 6y ago
  Considering AWS dirt cheap is like considering a tesla to be dirt cheap. You're talking big money, I'm saying most people can't do that because they don't have that kind of money. A simple colocated server nowadays can do almost a petabyte a month for less than $1000. Lookup how much that is on AWS. Lambdas and s3 are cool until you get ddos'd and now owe way more money. Or, your software doesn't work with lambda, which is true of the overwhelming majority of services.
dragonwriter 6y ago
> Once you scale you will no longer afford to use AWS and have to colocate your own hardware, along with entirely reimplementing your stack to use open source software. If you price right, then if you scale to the point you need it for ongoing costs, you'll have money to spend on the one-time cost of building an abstraction layer over any locked-in services and switching to that, enabling both a migration off and, potentially, its own resellable product.

nemothekid 6y ago

>Once you scale you will no longer afford to use AWS and have to colocate your own hardware, along with entirely reimplementing your stack to use open source software. More companies are moving to the cloud from managed colo than the inverse. For example, companies like Uber and Adobe has been moving from their own datacenters to AWS. Even dinosaurs like Disney have moved to the cloud. Anyone who saves a significant amount of money running their own DCs vs uses the cloud either has significant security requirements or is the in the business of selling infrastructure (ex. Dropbox)

libria 6y ago
And even for those "dinosaurs" that are persnickety about control, Outposts allows them to house the rack onsite while still being managed by the AWS console. On on-premise cloud, if you will.

deanCommie 6y ago

I see it slightly differently. For most of the history of our industry, companies were penny-wise but pound-foolish. And I don't mean non technical leadership here, I include the developers themselves. (I'll spend 2 weeks to automate a tasks that takes 10 minutes to do manually once a week) Everyone is waking up to the "total cost" of software development. Market forces are forcing people to realize that developer time is the most valuable commodity there is. Companies don't go to the cloud because they have silicon valley money to burn. They go to the cloud because every minute of their developer time that is not spent on development operations and maintainance of code that a cloud provider offers instead, is a minute they can spend on the core UNIQUE business proposition of the company. You can bemoan the skills lost in our industry, but that always happened at every layer of abstraction in every technical industry.

ChicagoDave 6y ago

AWS is dirt cheap and many small and mid-range companies use their platform. If you architect things properly, you can get away with pennies on the dollar. Not every platform needs EC2 instances. Most can build on Lambdas, API Gateway, and S3. Not sure what evidence supports this notion of billions and privilege. If anything, AWS has democratized entrepreneurial endeavors.

pas 6y ago
AWS is not dirt cheap. It has a great value proposition in case people have a lot more money than time/expertise/etc. (So usually for one-man army startups, or startups with unlimited VC funds that want "hypergrowth", and for very high-margin high-growth/high-volume businesses where they can make a special deal with AWS, that is Netflix.) > If anything, AWS has democratized entrepreneurial endeavors. More likely AWS simply made a lot of money on the race to the bottom (or top) with regards to an ever faster, fatter, fancier and shinier Web. (Now everyone needs a CDN, everyone needs many PoPs, because the market forces demand this. Of course the total costs are enormous, but due to the increased scale and decades of technological changes the unit costs have gone down.) > Most can build on Lambdas, API Gateway, and S3. Sure, and it's great if people are aware of what kind of workload to put where. And if they build in rate limits. Otherwise they will be surprised when they run into the classic gotchas of "how we burnt all of our seed money on AWS bills".
devwastaken 6y ago
Considering AWS dirt cheap is like considering a tesla to be dirt cheap. You're talking big money, I'm saying most people can't do that because they don't have that kind of money. A simple colocated server nowadays can do almost a petabyte a month for less than $1000. Lookup how much that is on AWS. Lambdas and s3 are cool until you get ddos'd and now owe way more money. Or, your software doesn't work with lambda, which is true of the overwhelming majority of services.

dragonwriter 6y ago

> Once you scale you will no longer afford to use AWS and have to colocate your own hardware, along with entirely reimplementing your stack to use open source software. If you price right, then if you scale to the point you need it for ongoing costs, you'll have money to spend on the one-time cost of building an abstraction layer over any locked-in services and switching to that, enabling both a migration off and, potentially, its own resellable product.