12 ms·

It's not about hyperscale, it's about time to market. Traditional corporate datacenters were dogshit when it came to provisioning new resources for business ca

It's not about hyperscale, it's about time to market. Traditional corporate datacenters were dogshit when it came to provisioning new resources for business capabilities. In today's world, we need the ability to spin up and down deployments very quickly. We don't need huge numbers of resources, just fast response.

benjaminwootton 5y ago
I have worked with hundreds of companies moving to AWS, and believe that this is the answer. People are investing in cloud because its faster, more agile and better, not because it's cheaper. The top line looks expensive, but if you then do the correct analysis on the cost side of the equation (taking out staff costs and DC costs) then I think it is either close or in the black from a cost perspective. If the business case was really bad, I don't think we would see the rapid uptake we have seen.
- hectord 5y ago
  If you think from an economic standpoint, Amazon should price AWS only a bit cheaper than the on-prem options. It's a way to maximize their profits. Then you have competition (GCP, Azure, Alibaba) which will tend to lower the price, but for now the cloud industry grows. Their goal is to attract new customers who didn't use the cloud before.
deepstack 5y ago
have developed on both AWS and non AWS server and db. There is no deference now days. Depending on if you want to hire the right people with the right skills is another thing.
sgt101 5y ago
Also experience. My team has been doing cloud deployments for the last 18mths, now we are on a gig at a company that has onprem. In theory the onprem infrastructure is comparable to cloud (K8's, GPU's, HDFS, Kafka) but the reality is that to get a set of K8's pods for a release has taken 2 weeks, 10+ meetings (calls) countless messages and 40+ emails. And the ones we got on Friday were wrong (we asked for 3 * 16GB ones + 1 * 2GB, we got a 16GB project container with 4GB pod limits). For our hadoop request - yes it got provisioned in >8hrs (mostly I think because no one is using it) but none of the access instructions work and everyone who has used it is mysteriously unavailable - so we can't access it. Compare and contrast to self service from any cloud. Why : well it's demand management. If you do self service and say "pay for what you want" then IT's costs bloom and the CIO is shot. If you do that in a cloud scenario then Cloud costs bloom and the CIO says "you guys have spent your money badly". This means that you need police and you need people who you ask to give you what you need if they are happy. These people obstruct you and then get things wrong.
- mfer 5y ago
  You bring up some great points. There are two that I see. First, there are internal processes. All too often they end up needlessly slowing velocity. This isn't a technology problem but a people problem. Using a public cloud enables people to circumvent these issues, in some cases. Second, there are costs. What does it cost to give someone the features they ask for in the time they want it? This is a requirements, design, time, and cost problem.
  - sgt101 5y ago
    Yes - thinking about it, it's a market failure. Basically small markets (internal IT) can't sustain the investment to support the requirements design time cost issue - while the public cloud folk can say "any colour you like so long as it's black" and there are enough takers to pay for it all.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
> In today's world, we need the ability to spin up and down deployments very quickly. Do you really? In my experience, admittedly outside of SV, pretty much nobody needs that.
- zbentley 5y ago
  I think this is a common need, even in smaller organizations. Spinning up/down deployments doesn't imply you're doing it in response to scale needs (most orgs don't have those); often it means you're simply experimenting with new tools or new product offerings. Having the ability to do that without waiting for infrastructure provisioning, and having the ability to only spin up the resources you need to see (for example) if a given version of a web framework can run your site well, or of a new database meets your needs, can be a significant value add.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    > often it means you're simply experimenting with new tools or new product offerings. That only makes sense to me in the context of a business being an IT shop to begin with. Most businesses aren't, and their new product offerings require factories and dies and labor and materials. Besides which, the problem of provisioning is entirely overblown for this scale of business. I can spin up new servers all day on our on-prem vSphere cluster.
    - dagw 5y ago
      sense to me in the context of a business being an IT shop to begin with. Lots of businesses outside of 'IT shops' use computers. I currently work in Civil Engineering and more and more of our product and service offerings have an IT/Online/Web based component which involves setting up some sort server. I can spin up new servers all day on our on-prem vSphere cluster. I what price? At my old job an on-perm vSphere 'machine' cost my department a lot more than what AWS was charging.
      - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
hong_kong 5y ago
People also seem to be overlooking the benefits of downward optionality - you effectively transform a fixed cost (servers and staff to run them) into a variable one, that you can flex down cheaply (no long-term leases or redundancy payments). It lets you test things out (e.g. entering a new market) and cheaply wind them down if they don't work out.

benjaminwootton 5y ago

I have worked with hundreds of companies moving to AWS, and believe that this is the answer. People are investing in cloud because its faster, more agile and better, not because it's cheaper. The top line looks expensive, but if you then do the correct analysis on the cost side of the equation (taking out staff costs and DC costs) then I think it is either close or in the black from a cost perspective. If the business case was really bad, I don't think we would see the rapid uptake we have seen.

hectord 5y ago
If you think from an economic standpoint, Amazon should price AWS only a bit cheaper than the on-prem options. It's a way to maximize their profits. Then you have competition (GCP, Azure, Alibaba) which will tend to lower the price, but for now the cloud industry grows. Their goal is to attract new customers who didn't use the cloud before.

deepstack 5y ago

have developed on both AWS and non AWS server and db. There is no deference now days. Depending on if you want to hire the right people with the right skills is another thing.

sgt101 5y ago

Also experience. My team has been doing cloud deployments for the last 18mths, now we are on a gig at a company that has onprem. In theory the onprem infrastructure is comparable to cloud (K8's, GPU's, HDFS, Kafka) but the reality is that to get a set of K8's pods for a release has taken 2 weeks, 10+ meetings (calls) countless messages and 40+ emails. And the ones we got on Friday were wrong (we asked for 3 * 16GB ones + 1 * 2GB, we got a 16GB project container with 4GB pod limits). For our hadoop request - yes it got provisioned in >8hrs (mostly I think because no one is using it) but none of the access instructions work and everyone who has used it is mysteriously unavailable - so we can't access it. Compare and contrast to self service from any cloud. Why : well it's demand management. If you do self service and say "pay for what you want" then IT's costs bloom and the CIO is shot. If you do that in a cloud scenario then Cloud costs bloom and the CIO says "you guys have spent your money badly". This means that you need police and you need people who you ask to give you what you need if they are happy. These people obstruct you and then get things wrong.

mfer 5y ago
You bring up some great points. There are two that I see. First, there are internal processes. All too often they end up needlessly slowing velocity. This isn't a technology problem but a people problem. Using a public cloud enables people to circumvent these issues, in some cases. Second, there are costs. What does it cost to give someone the features they ask for in the time they want it? This is a requirements, design, time, and cost problem.
- sgt101 5y ago
  Yes - thinking about it, it's a market failure. Basically small markets (internal IT) can't sustain the investment to support the requirements design time cost issue - while the public cloud folk can say "any colour you like so long as it's black" and there are enough takers to pay for it all.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago

> In today's world, we need the ability to spin up and down deployments very quickly. Do you really? In my experience, admittedly outside of SV, pretty much nobody needs that.

zbentley 5y ago
I think this is a common need, even in smaller organizations. Spinning up/down deployments doesn't imply you're doing it in response to scale needs (most orgs don't have those); often it means you're simply experimenting with new tools or new product offerings. Having the ability to do that without waiting for infrastructure provisioning, and having the ability to only spin up the resources you need to see (for example) if a given version of a web framework can run your site well, or of a new database meets your needs, can be a significant value add.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  > often it means you're simply experimenting with new tools or new product offerings. That only makes sense to me in the context of a business being an IT shop to begin with. Most businesses aren't, and their new product offerings require factories and dies and labor and materials. Besides which, the problem of provisioning is entirely overblown for this scale of business. I can spin up new servers all day on our on-prem vSphere cluster.
  - dagw 5y ago
    sense to me in the context of a business being an IT shop to begin with. Lots of businesses outside of 'IT shops' use computers. I currently work in Civil Engineering and more and more of our product and service offerings have an IT/Online/Web based component which involves setting up some sort server. I can spin up new servers all day on our on-prem vSphere cluster. I what price? At my old job an on-perm vSphere 'machine' cost my department a lot more than what AWS was charging.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago

hong_kong 5y ago

People also seem to be overlooking the benefits of downward optionality - you effectively transform a fixed cost (servers and staff to run them) into a variable one, that you can flex down cheaply (no long-term leases or redundancy payments). It lets you test things out (e.g. entering a new market) and cheaply wind them down if they don't work out.