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When I moved reddit from on-prem to the cloud, I cut our costs by 27%. It was the same number of people managing both infrastructures, but once we moved to the

When I moved reddit from on-prem to the cloud, I cut our costs by 27%. It was the same number of people managing both infrastructures, but once we moved to the cloud, I no longer spent most of my time imaging machines and driving them to a datacenter to rack and stack them. Instead I spent my time coding ways to manage machines via API, so that when I needed to double our infrastructure, I just ran a script. Cloud makes a ton of sense for high growth companies. If your infrastructure is mostly static, that's when it makes sense to go to a datacenter. Or if you have one very specific use case, like Dropbox.

trog 3y ago
This is very unusual in my experience, except in cases where the on-prem was either massively over-provisioned or the customer was getting absolutely gouged on pricing at the DC or IP transit or whatever. Do you recall what the big savings were in? Compute, storage, DB etc? Be really interested to understand why this case is so different to many I've read.
- jedberg 3y ago
  Funny enough I have the exact numbers handy! Keep in mind this was 2008 and we only had 150M page views a month back then. Data Center (per month) Servers: $6K Cabinet (x3): $15K Bandwidth: $2.5K Support: N/A Total: $23.5K EC2 (per month) Servers: $13K Storage: $1.5K Bandwidth: $1.1K Support: $1.2K Total: $16.8K
  - trog 3y ago
    Interesting, thanks - I assume on EC2 you were running your own database servers? (Just based on the fact that you don't mention RDS.) This would keep costs down significantly in most cases although I assume they get transferred into staff costs if you've got people maintaining them to get the same level of support for things like backup, replication, etc that you get for "free" in RDS...?
    - jedberg 3y ago
      Yes, we ran Postgres on EC2. I admined it myself both in AWS and in the datacenter. RDS didn't exist at the time. :) At the time we and Heroku were running the two largest Postgres clusters on EC2.

trog 3y ago

This is very unusual in my experience, except in cases where the on-prem was either massively over-provisioned or the customer was getting absolutely gouged on pricing at the DC or IP transit or whatever. Do you recall what the big savings were in? Compute, storage, DB etc? Be really interested to understand why this case is so different to many I've read.

jedberg 3y ago
Funny enough I have the exact numbers handy! Keep in mind this was 2008 and we only had 150M page views a month back then. Data Center (per month) Servers: $6K Cabinet (x3): $15K Bandwidth: $2.5K Support: N/A Total: $23.5K EC2 (per month) Servers: $13K Storage: $1.5K Bandwidth: $1.1K Support: $1.2K Total: $16.8K
- trog 3y ago
  Interesting, thanks - I assume on EC2 you were running your own database servers? (Just based on the fact that you don't mention RDS.) This would keep costs down significantly in most cases although I assume they get transferred into staff costs if you've got people maintaining them to get the same level of support for things like backup, replication, etc that you get for "free" in RDS...?
  - jedberg 3y ago
    Yes, we ran Postgres on EC2. I admined it myself both in AWS and in the datacenter. RDS didn't exist at the time. :) At the time we and Heroku were running the two largest Postgres clusters on EC2.