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> If you have less than 250 engineers, this guide is not for you? Strange. I'd guess that if your org is big enough to have 250 engineers in its payroll, AWS

by fivea 5y ago

> If you have less than 250 engineers, this guide is not for you? Strange. I'd guess that if your org is big enough to have 250 engineers in its payroll, AWS services are a waste of cash given you can deploy better and cheaper. For example, Hetzner has less than 200 employees, and it's a global cloud provider.

hhh 5y ago
I don’t think this is true at all. AWS has a lot more in an org than “the bill is smaller.” There’s a restrictive factor when hiring if you move away from Google Cloud,Azure, and AWS.
- fivea 5y ago
  > I don’t think this is true at all. AWS has a lot more in an org than “the bill is smaller.” The bill is not only astronomically high but it's also unpredictable and uncontrollable. Which added valued do you believe justifies this? Meanwhile, keep in mind that the likes of Dropbox gave AWS a try but in the end learned from their experience and opted to migrate out after only 5 years. > There’s a restrictive factor when hiring if you move away from Google Cloud,Azure, and AWS. I disagree, considering that in AWS you either run vanilla VMs from EC2, or containerized solutions in ECS/EKS. Either way you are already better off using either your local VMs or your company's kubernetes deployment.
  - marcinzm 5y ago
    >The bill is not only astronomically high but it's also unpredictable and uncontrollable. If you've got 250 engineers then the AWS is going to be fairly predictable and well monitored. >Meanwhile, keep in mind that the likes of Dropbox gave AWS a try but in the end learned from their experience and opted to migrate out after only 5 years. Dropbox is memorable because they migrated off which says what many other companies don't do. As you can tell by the massive growth of Azure many large enterprise companies definitely see the value despite already have their own datacenters.
    - fivea 5y ago
      > If you've got 250 engineers then the AWS is going to be fairly predictable and well monitored. This is the very first time I hear anyone describe AWS services as "fairly predictable and well monitored", because there is simply no such thing. There are professional services being sold at a premium whose value proposition is to make sense of AWS billing and reign it in. With AWS, your company simply sets a budget with a significant slack and hope for the best. > Dropbox is memorable because they migrated off which says what many other companies don't do. Not true. Dropbox is memorable because it was depicted as a poster child of AWS, which ultimately found out it was not worth it at all. And Dropbox is not alone. https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2016/03/16/moving-away-from-aws-cloud-dropbox-isnt-an-anomaly-and-heres-why https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2016/03/16/movi... https://www.uscloud.com/blog/3-reasons-33-companies-ditching-aws-azure/ https://www.uscloud.com/blog/3-reasons-33-companies-ditching...
xyzzy123 5y ago
At the high end AWS was a huge win for "traditional enterprises" because it broke them free from being held hostage by their own internal IT bureaucracies. Enterprises provided many of the things inside AWS but much, much worse. I actually think the political revolution it (cloud) triggered was a bigger thing than the technical and engineering changes. AWS is expensive compared to a machine under your desk but not so much compared to the fully loaded cost of (say) a VMware VM at a bank DC, which includes multi-year enterprise hardware & software commitments to make it go plus staff and admin costs. The DC model choked off innovation that was not approved "from the top" and severely damaged agility.
- benjaminwootton 5y ago
  Totally agree with this and have made the same point many times. The chance to reset the culture, operating model, politics and suppliers is the really big opportunity for big companies adopting cloud.
- marcinzm 5y ago
  I think the people complaining about cloud have never had to work in a large enterprise with an internal IT department managing a physical datacenter. Even at Google people complain about that side of things.
CSDude 5y ago
This apples to oranges comparision always keeps coming up. Comparing AWS to a VPS/Physical Services provider is strange. AWS has more services than Hetzner has as employees. AWS bandwidth, computation has huge and unreasonable price, but there are also superb services in AWS like S3, SQS, DynamoDB, Lambda. All major cloud providers have similar computation pricing. As much as I love Hetzner, they are not a major cloud provider.
- qaq 5y ago
  DynamoDB is a horrible KV
marcinzm 5y ago
In my experience the productivity cost on a larger company of physical servers is massive. The IT department is a monopolistic provider of compute services to other departments. At the same time IT competes with those departments for overall company budget. Needless to say the result of these mismatched economic and political incentives is a mess.
tgv 5y ago
That’s my guess to, but then the flowchart mentions 25 requests. Per day!

by fivea 5y ago

hhh 5y ago

I don’t think this is true at all. AWS has a lot more in an org than “the bill is smaller.” There’s a restrictive factor when hiring if you move away from Google Cloud,Azure, and AWS.

fivea 5y ago
> I don’t think this is true at all. AWS has a lot more in an org than “the bill is smaller.” The bill is not only astronomically high but it's also unpredictable and uncontrollable. Which added valued do you believe justifies this? Meanwhile, keep in mind that the likes of Dropbox gave AWS a try but in the end learned from their experience and opted to migrate out after only 5 years. > There’s a restrictive factor when hiring if you move away from Google Cloud,Azure, and AWS. I disagree, considering that in AWS you either run vanilla VMs from EC2, or containerized solutions in ECS/EKS. Either way you are already better off using either your local VMs or your company's kubernetes deployment.
- marcinzm 5y ago
  >The bill is not only astronomically high but it's also unpredictable and uncontrollable. If you've got 250 engineers then the AWS is going to be fairly predictable and well monitored. >Meanwhile, keep in mind that the likes of Dropbox gave AWS a try but in the end learned from their experience and opted to migrate out after only 5 years. Dropbox is memorable because they migrated off which says what many other companies don't do. As you can tell by the massive growth of Azure many large enterprise companies definitely see the value despite already have their own datacenters.
  - fivea 5y ago
    > If you've got 250 engineers then the AWS is going to be fairly predictable and well monitored. This is the very first time I hear anyone describe AWS services as "fairly predictable and well monitored", because there is simply no such thing. There are professional services being sold at a premium whose value proposition is to make sense of AWS billing and reign it in. With AWS, your company simply sets a budget with a significant slack and hope for the best. > Dropbox is memorable because they migrated off which says what many other companies don't do. Not true. Dropbox is memorable because it was depicted as a poster child of AWS, which ultimately found out it was not worth it at all. And Dropbox is not alone. https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2016/03/16/moving-away-from-aws-cloud-dropbox-isnt-an-anomaly-and-heres-why https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2016/03/16/movi... https://www.uscloud.com/blog/3-reasons-33-companies-ditching-aws-azure/ https://www.uscloud.com/blog/3-reasons-33-companies-ditching...

xyzzy123 5y ago

At the high end AWS was a huge win for "traditional enterprises" because it broke them free from being held hostage by their own internal IT bureaucracies. Enterprises provided many of the things inside AWS but much, much worse. I actually think the political revolution it (cloud) triggered was a bigger thing than the technical and engineering changes. AWS is expensive compared to a machine under your desk but not so much compared to the fully loaded cost of (say) a VMware VM at a bank DC, which includes multi-year enterprise hardware & software commitments to make it go plus staff and admin costs. The DC model choked off innovation that was not approved "from the top" and severely damaged agility.

benjaminwootton 5y ago
Totally agree with this and have made the same point many times. The chance to reset the culture, operating model, politics and suppliers is the really big opportunity for big companies adopting cloud.
marcinzm 5y ago
I think the people complaining about cloud have never had to work in a large enterprise with an internal IT department managing a physical datacenter. Even at Google people complain about that side of things.

CSDude 5y ago

This apples to oranges comparision always keeps coming up. Comparing AWS to a VPS/Physical Services provider is strange. AWS has more services than Hetzner has as employees. AWS bandwidth, computation has huge and unreasonable price, but there are also superb services in AWS like S3, SQS, DynamoDB, Lambda. All major cloud providers have similar computation pricing. As much as I love Hetzner, they are not a major cloud provider.

qaq 5y ago
DynamoDB is a horrible KV

marcinzm 5y ago

In my experience the productivity cost on a larger company of physical servers is massive. The IT department is a monopolistic provider of compute services to other departments. At the same time IT competes with those departments for overall company budget. Needless to say the result of these mismatched economic and political incentives is a mess.

tgv 5y ago

That’s my guess to, but then the flowchart mentions 25 requests. Per day!