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Honest question and frankly scared to ask because it sounds stupid: if you have like 30 mins of downtime on AWS every year and spend 3x cost on managing their i

Honest question and frankly scared to ask because it sounds stupid: if you have like 30 mins of downtime on AWS every year and spend 3x cost on managing their infrastructure risk by deploying it on multi-AZ and multi-region (and thereby AWS pushing reliability management back to the customer); is the value proposition of cloud just some dude to install a disk if it goes out on a rack in your office? May be there is a reverse incentive for AWS to keep their AZ's slightly unreliable so that customers spend 3x or 9x or what have you to make sure nothing ever goes down. Like what's wrong with on-prem? Lack of diesel generators? We could just have that without AWS. Bare metal datacenter. Counter to most opinions, I think managing a server isn't that difficult. I am sort of a semi-professional and prosumer that has no trouble managing servers for years on end with less downtime than a whole fricking datacenter. There is more serious discussion and new revelations around this [1], [2]. Sometimes it is hard to ask questions about layers of abstractions that have built up and no one dares to think about getting rid of them. [1] https://www.economist.com/business/2021/07/03/do-the-costs-of-the-cloud-outweigh-the-benefits https://www.economist.com/business/2021/07/03/do-the-costs-o... [2] https://oxide.computer/ https://oxide.computer/

rrdharan 4y ago
Security, Compliance, and Geographic footprint. If you're a large multinational, you basically face the same threats as Google/AWS/MSFT but there's no way you can hire, train and keep as good a production security team as them (well maybe better than Azure, but I digress). You can't afford the upfront contractual / capital costs to maintain datacenters in every region. And finally you can't afford the armies of lawyers and compliance engineering teams to try and reason about your data residency and things like GDPR and CCPA. In other words, you're mostly paying for production security / privacy incident response, compliance (lawyers) and datacenters.
mannyv 4y ago
Having managed a small data center in the past and having seen what it takes to manage multiple enterprise-scale data centers, the answer is "no, AWS does it better." The company that I'm in right now has two engineers (including myself) who are building and maintaining a product that serves millions of streams a week. There's no fucking way we could have done this ourselves. One F5 would cost more than our entire total AWS bill for two years - and we'd have to have at least 4 F5s if we wanted to try to match AWS. Plus the media encoders would cost a fortune. For some things it's fine to head over to lowendbox.com and pick up a cheap VPS hosting package. We could theoretically build our stack on top of a bunch of VPSs, sync everything with rsync, etc. But then we'd be spending time building infrastructure (which is pretty much valueless) instead of our product.
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rrdharan 4y ago

Security, Compliance, and Geographic footprint. If you're a large multinational, you basically face the same threats as Google/AWS/MSFT but there's no way you can hire, train and keep as good a production security team as them (well maybe better than Azure, but I digress). You can't afford the upfront contractual / capital costs to maintain datacenters in every region. And finally you can't afford the armies of lawyers and compliance engineering teams to try and reason about your data residency and things like GDPR and CCPA. In other words, you're mostly paying for production security / privacy incident response, compliance (lawyers) and datacenters.

mannyv 4y ago

Having managed a small data center in the past and having seen what it takes to manage multiple enterprise-scale data centers, the answer is "no, AWS does it better." The company that I'm in right now has two engineers (including myself) who are building and maintaining a product that serves millions of streams a week. There's no fucking way we could have done this ourselves. One F5 would cost more than our entire total AWS bill for two years - and we'd have to have at least 4 F5s if we wanted to try to match AWS. Plus the media encoders would cost a fortune. For some things it's fine to head over to lowendbox.com and pick up a cheap VPS hosting package. We could theoretically build our stack on top of a bunch of VPSs, sync everything with rsync, etc. But then we'd be spending time building infrastructure (which is pretty much valueless) instead of our product.

deleted 4y ago
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