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I worked at several startups before working at FAANG - none of them operated at any scale that they needed to be on AWS. None of them ever grew enough to need t

I worked at several startups before working at FAANG - none of them operated at any scale that they needed to be on AWS. None of them ever grew enough to need to be on AWS either. One of them did a bunch of stuff that made use of AWS - but it didn't deliver any value to our customers, and probably made our product substantially worse. It cost $30k a day, and unquestionably was not worth the cost, and everyone on the team was fired after a few months.

Karrot_Kream 5y ago
I worked at a startup that didn't use the cloud and was hemorrhaging money by only using a handful of compute in a DC despite renting a whole bunch of space/power. They could have moved to AWS and saved a ton on cost, but their CTO was comfortable with renting colo space and knew how to run a colo-based tech company. There's not much you can do when people make bad decisions. At most you can understand the tradeoffs of the decision space and do your best. There's rarely a silver bullet.
- onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
  There are options beside AWS and colo. A lot of companies are fine just using a handful of VPSes. I think the biggest problem with starting on AWS is engineers are extremely susceptible to playing with new toys - for better or worse. Engineers are going to try all AWSes new stuff, which is fine. The problem stems from engineers wanting to do stuff on the newest shiniest AWS toy whether that actually makes sense financially or much more importantly in terms of the product roadmap.
  - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
    Yeah there's tons of options. There's the big clouds/cloud-native stuff. There's the cloud-VMs/VPSes. There's colos. There's making a DC at an office through DIA. Understanding these options is key to making a good, informed decision IMO.
  - vineyardmike 5y ago
    > whether that actually makes sense financially or much more importantly in terms of the product roadmap. If design docs don't at least mention the cost - and your business cares about cost - then you should probably have a chat with the engineering dept. At a prior FAANG job we included basic cost analysis in our decisions. You don't always need the cheaper option if it doesn't make sense, but you should probably know the traffic that shiny new toy will receive and the cost associated with it. (eg. soln A needs 25% more compute, and the internal price is X vs soln B needs 10% more compute, but will increase storage costs for caching at X per gb for ~Y gb). I recall a case where a coworker (Senior SDE in Silicon Valley, so easily 25k a month salary) spent a month reducing our $500 SQS bill to $350 because our director wanted to see teams making smart financial optimizations. Meanwhile, our EC2 bill was $50k a month. Not everything is smart financially to focus on fixing. What is the compSci quote on premature optimization?
    - noreallyitis 5y ago
      It's "premature ejaculation is the root of all evil"
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
School-Cotton 5y ago
FAANG doesn't need to use cloud either. Notably, Facebook doesn't (and, a bunch of stuff at Amazon was still not on cloud until _long_ after AWS was invented).
- iamtedd 5y ago
  Isn't Netflix 100% on AWS?
  - xuki 5y ago
    IIRC Netflix run their own boxes for content delivery, which makes sense because of the exorbitant cost of bandwidth on AWS.
- onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
  Facebook doesn't use the cloud? Are you crazy? They built their own cloud. They just don't sell it as a service. Sure - not everything at these companies needs to be on the cloud. But when you're dealing with sensitive information, you don't want people rolling their own infrastructure.
  - jjeaff 5y ago
    Is it really cloud if you built it yourself and run it on your own hardware in your own data center?
    - imwillofficial 5y ago
      Yes. A private cloud due to the tech stack at work.
    - humantorso 5y ago
      Yes! the fact you are asking this belies your understanding of the cloud.
      - School-Cotton 5y ago
kube-system 5y ago
The advantage of AWS for a very small organization is flexibility and convenience, not scale. Of course, if you can't trust your developers to spend money wisely, you need guardrails on cost, no matter where you're spending it.
- onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
  Flexibility and convenience are benefits of the cloud in general, not exclusive to a single PaaS like AWS.

Karrot_Kream 5y ago

I worked at a startup that didn't use the cloud and was hemorrhaging money by only using a handful of compute in a DC despite renting a whole bunch of space/power. They could have moved to AWS and saved a ton on cost, but their CTO was comfortable with renting colo space and knew how to run a colo-based tech company. There's not much you can do when people make bad decisions. At most you can understand the tradeoffs of the decision space and do your best. There's rarely a silver bullet.

onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
There are options beside AWS and colo. A lot of companies are fine just using a handful of VPSes. I think the biggest problem with starting on AWS is engineers are extremely susceptible to playing with new toys - for better or worse. Engineers are going to try all AWSes new stuff, which is fine. The problem stems from engineers wanting to do stuff on the newest shiniest AWS toy whether that actually makes sense financially or much more importantly in terms of the product roadmap.
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  Yeah there's tons of options. There's the big clouds/cloud-native stuff. There's the cloud-VMs/VPSes. There's colos. There's making a DC at an office through DIA. Understanding these options is key to making a good, informed decision IMO.
- vineyardmike 5y ago
  > whether that actually makes sense financially or much more importantly in terms of the product roadmap. If design docs don't at least mention the cost - and your business cares about cost - then you should probably have a chat with the engineering dept. At a prior FAANG job we included basic cost analysis in our decisions. You don't always need the cheaper option if it doesn't make sense, but you should probably know the traffic that shiny new toy will receive and the cost associated with it. (eg. soln A needs 25% more compute, and the internal price is X vs soln B needs 10% more compute, but will increase storage costs for caching at X per gb for ~Y gb). I recall a case where a coworker (Senior SDE in Silicon Valley, so easily 25k a month salary) spent a month reducing our $500 SQS bill to $350 because our director wanted to see teams making smart financial optimizations. Meanwhile, our EC2 bill was $50k a month. Not everything is smart financially to focus on fixing. What is the compSci quote on premature optimization?
  - noreallyitis 5y ago
    It's "premature ejaculation is the root of all evil"

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

School-Cotton 5y ago

FAANG doesn't need to use cloud either. Notably, Facebook doesn't (and, a bunch of stuff at Amazon was still not on cloud until _long_ after AWS was invented).

iamtedd 5y ago
Isn't Netflix 100% on AWS?
- xuki 5y ago
  IIRC Netflix run their own boxes for content delivery, which makes sense because of the exorbitant cost of bandwidth on AWS.
onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
Facebook doesn't use the cloud? Are you crazy? They built their own cloud. They just don't sell it as a service. Sure - not everything at these companies needs to be on the cloud. But when you're dealing with sensitive information, you don't want people rolling their own infrastructure.
- jjeaff 5y ago
  Is it really cloud if you built it yourself and run it on your own hardware in your own data center?
  - imwillofficial 5y ago
    Yes. A private cloud due to the tech stack at work.
  - humantorso 5y ago
    Yes! the fact you are asking this belies your understanding of the cloud.
    - School-Cotton 5y ago

kube-system 5y ago

The advantage of AWS for a very small organization is flexibility and convenience, not scale. Of course, if you can't trust your developers to spend money wisely, you need guardrails on cost, no matter where you're spending it.

onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
Flexibility and convenience are benefits of the cloud in general, not exclusive to a single PaaS like AWS.