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Cloud clearly makes sense for: - small business with at least some reliability expectation, and little to none IT expertise - huge workload requirement volati

Cloud clearly makes sense for: - small business with at least some reliability expectation, and little to none IT expertise - huge workload requirement volatility - having someone else to blame - solution is already working in cloud, with teams being very comfortable there, and perceiving on-prem as “enemy” (analogy: forcing devs to rewrite stuff from haskell to java) - that extra cost is small budget line for you On the other hand, it does not make sense to go cloud, if you are sufficiently big and already have on prem solution and expertise in house. (Extreme case: google, does not use aws for its main load; this upper threshold I wager is couple of orders of magnitude smaller)

coredog64 3y ago
Amazon retail runs on AWS, and I think we can agree that Amazon retail is reasonably described as “large scale”
- no_wizard 3y ago
  This is a quirk of the business that is Amazon and AWS, as they started by selling excess compute and expertise, due to how Amazon was built as API first internally it was almost natural. It’s in no way the norm for a smaller business.
  - rented_mule 3y ago
    This matches the public (i.e., non-Amazon) speculation I was hearing around the launch of S3 and later EC2. But not what I was hearing internally when I worked at Amazon. I was there when S3, the first AWS service, and EC2 were launched. I was working on what I believe to be the first Amazon (non-AWS) application that used S3 for storage. Getting that approved was not easy - all the same skepticism existed internally as externally (cost, availability, durability, security, etc.). The story I was hearing internally was that it was too costly to scale infrastructure the way Amazon had been doing it, it was fragile, and the expertise wasn't keeping up with growth. So, set the bar a lot higher, and build infra that is big enough and flexible enough to be everybody's infra, and then Amazon's applications (e.g., retail) could run on AWS' excess capacity. Literally the opposite of what external folks were guessing. I believe they were completely physically separate data centers - even the physical location of AWS data centers were on a need-to-know basis internally (the internal lore was "under a mountain in Virginia" - this was years before Regions and Availability Zones). And any bugs in AWS could be worked out with outside usage before moving Amazon's applications onto it. Also, Amazon needed the elasticity of AWS because of the nature of their retail business. At the time that the initial AWS services were being developed, a massive chunk of Amazon's traffic came during the holiday season. IIRC, something like half of the year's traffic and revenue, possibly more, came in November/December each year. That meant a lot of capacity was sitting idle most of the year. Selling that excess capacity would mean shutting AWS down every holiday season. For a time, there was an internal mailing list that wasn't yet locked down that contained reports on S3 bandwidth usage. The growth rate was shockingly high. I would guess that within a year or two of release, S3 was using a few (at least) orders of magnitude more bandwidth than everything else at Amazon combined.
    - no_wizard 3y ago
      In broad strokes, the main point I was makings till stands though: AWS was deliberately made to back the demanding scale of Amazon, it was a bet on the future and the Amazon model as much as it was product service, and that did mean they built expertise and hardware up and sold that as a product none the less. This still isn't the norm for most businesses, even big ones.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 3y ago
  Is that really a fair comparison though? AWS is a very weird argument to make because you could say that AWS is kind of “on premise” for Amazons purposes. Internally Amazon.com does not pay retail pricing or have the same level of support as third party end users. A better example would be looking at Jet.com/Walmart and asking if it runs on AWS.
  - overstay8930 3y ago
    Nobody who is big is paying retail prices, that's why saying "on premise is cheaper" is total copium. As soon as you start factoring in discounts (i.e. bandwidth is nearly free at some point), the math of being on premise completely falls apart to the point you are paying more for licensing and support for the hardware than you are the entire lifecycle of your infrastructure in the cloud. It's just that bad to do it yourself.
    - rstuart4133 3y ago
      > licensing and support for the hardware Sorry, but who pays for licensing and support of the hardware? I've never done that. You buy a Dell server or whatever, you pay for the 5 or 7 years warranty up front, you put in in a rack and you never literally touch it again until it's EOL'ed. If something breaks Dell touches it, not you. That typically costs around $500/year, albeit paid upfront. But you usually don't do that. Instead you rent a dedicated metal from someone. The cost if of the order of $1000/year including some storage, no more to pay unless you exceed 100TB/year. A similarly configured AWS EC2 instance is $13,000/year, plus bandwidth, plus whatever other services you get sucked into. And you will get sucked into it because if you ask AWS about any problem (like say, monitoring why your bills are so high), the answer is invariably "use this paid service of ours". You're kidding yourself if you think using AWS is cheaper than the alternatives. Those discounts you speak of are from an absurdly high starting point. I'm sure there are lots of reasons to use AWS or a similar cloud service, but unless you only need a lot of grunt for at most a few months price isn't one of them.
    - BackBlast 3y ago
      I ran the numbers the other day. For just compute with my particular load, my numbers say AWS costs 73928x more for lambda over my on-prem. Like for like is 1250x more. This is presuming the savings levels for being a big spender that I've heard about. That's a lot of room to work with for some inconvenience.
dzikimarian 3y ago
Depending how small is small business, but I would probably go with VPS.
MaxBarraclough 3y ago
> Extreme case: google, does not use aws for its main load; this upper threshold I wager is couple of orders of magnitude smaller Not a good example in my opinion, as Google is also a major provider of cloud services. AWS isn't the only game in town. I think Disney+ is a more interesting case. A quick google search turns up some articles saying their video streaming is powered by external CDNs. As I understand it, Netflix take the opposite approach and deliver all video data from their own Open Connect CDN, although they use AWS for other workloads (presumably including things like authentication, their recommendation engine, etc).
ipaddr 3y ago
Cloud doesn't make sense for small business. A vps would. If you are spending less than 100,000 you probably don't need it for your 10,000 million or less daily visitors
- Turing_Machine 3y ago
  If you're spending less than 100,000, you almost certainly aren't spending enough to pay salary + benefits for a sysadmin.
  - ipaddr 3y ago
    Why would you need additional people to manage a vps? The person managing amazon can very easily use cpanel because it is much simpler.
  - BackBlast 3y ago
    Why does everyone always jump to this fiction? You probably aren't paying a "cloud engineer" just to fiddle with cloud config full time with <$100k/yr spend. Why would you suddenly need a full time sysop to do the same capability level of on-prem? If you do 10 hours of "cloud engineering" a month to support an application, the same capability level of on-prem work is probably in the same ballpark. 5-30 hours. Yes, it can be lower than cloud. No, it's NOT suddenly 160 hours every month. Yes, it does mean you need someone who can wear the extra hat, cloud engineering skills are literally no different in this regard. Internet sites ran on basement and closet servers for years, actual server rooms for larger stuff. The jokes were tripping over power cords and backhoes digging up internet lines were the causes of most outages. It's never been easier to run on-prem than today. It cost a fraction of even budget VPS providers like Hetzner. For certain classes of applications, it's awesome. It's not everyone's cup of tea I'll grant. But if you are inclined to play with hardware or have someone in the org who does, and an extra 2-4 hours of downtime a year isn't that big of a deal (depending on general utility and network available at your chosen site). You can save tons of money.
    - icedchai 3y ago

coredog64 3y ago

Amazon retail runs on AWS, and I think we can agree that Amazon retail is reasonably described as “large scale”

no_wizard 3y ago
This is a quirk of the business that is Amazon and AWS, as they started by selling excess compute and expertise, due to how Amazon was built as API first internally it was almost natural. It’s in no way the norm for a smaller business.
- rented_mule 3y ago
  This matches the public (i.e., non-Amazon) speculation I was hearing around the launch of S3 and later EC2. But not what I was hearing internally when I worked at Amazon. I was there when S3, the first AWS service, and EC2 were launched. I was working on what I believe to be the first Amazon (non-AWS) application that used S3 for storage. Getting that approved was not easy - all the same skepticism existed internally as externally (cost, availability, durability, security, etc.). The story I was hearing internally was that it was too costly to scale infrastructure the way Amazon had been doing it, it was fragile, and the expertise wasn't keeping up with growth. So, set the bar a lot higher, and build infra that is big enough and flexible enough to be everybody's infra, and then Amazon's applications (e.g., retail) could run on AWS' excess capacity. Literally the opposite of what external folks were guessing. I believe they were completely physically separate data centers - even the physical location of AWS data centers were on a need-to-know basis internally (the internal lore was "under a mountain in Virginia" - this was years before Regions and Availability Zones). And any bugs in AWS could be worked out with outside usage before moving Amazon's applications onto it. Also, Amazon needed the elasticity of AWS because of the nature of their retail business. At the time that the initial AWS services were being developed, a massive chunk of Amazon's traffic came during the holiday season. IIRC, something like half of the year's traffic and revenue, possibly more, came in November/December each year. That meant a lot of capacity was sitting idle most of the year. Selling that excess capacity would mean shutting AWS down every holiday season. For a time, there was an internal mailing list that wasn't yet locked down that contained reports on S3 bandwidth usage. The growth rate was shockingly high. I would guess that within a year or two of release, S3 was using a few (at least) orders of magnitude more bandwidth than everything else at Amazon combined.
  - no_wizard 3y ago
    In broad strokes, the main point I was makings till stands though: AWS was deliberately made to back the demanding scale of Amazon, it was a bet on the future and the Amazon model as much as it was product service, and that did mean they built expertise and hardware up and sold that as a product none the less. This still isn't the norm for most businesses, even big ones.
SOLAR_FIELDS 3y ago
Is that really a fair comparison though? AWS is a very weird argument to make because you could say that AWS is kind of “on premise” for Amazons purposes. Internally Amazon.com does not pay retail pricing or have the same level of support as third party end users. A better example would be looking at Jet.com/Walmart and asking if it runs on AWS.
- overstay8930 3y ago
  Nobody who is big is paying retail prices, that's why saying "on premise is cheaper" is total copium. As soon as you start factoring in discounts (i.e. bandwidth is nearly free at some point), the math of being on premise completely falls apart to the point you are paying more for licensing and support for the hardware than you are the entire lifecycle of your infrastructure in the cloud. It's just that bad to do it yourself.
  - rstuart4133 3y ago
    > licensing and support for the hardware Sorry, but who pays for licensing and support of the hardware? I've never done that. You buy a Dell server or whatever, you pay for the 5 or 7 years warranty up front, you put in in a rack and you never literally touch it again until it's EOL'ed. If something breaks Dell touches it, not you. That typically costs around $500/year, albeit paid upfront. But you usually don't do that. Instead you rent a dedicated metal from someone. The cost if of the order of $1000/year including some storage, no more to pay unless you exceed 100TB/year. A similarly configured AWS EC2 instance is $13,000/year, plus bandwidth, plus whatever other services you get sucked into. And you will get sucked into it because if you ask AWS about any problem (like say, monitoring why your bills are so high), the answer is invariably "use this paid service of ours". You're kidding yourself if you think using AWS is cheaper than the alternatives. Those discounts you speak of are from an absurdly high starting point. I'm sure there are lots of reasons to use AWS or a similar cloud service, but unless you only need a lot of grunt for at most a few months price isn't one of them.
  - BackBlast 3y ago
    I ran the numbers the other day. For just compute with my particular load, my numbers say AWS costs 73928x more for lambda over my on-prem. Like for like is 1250x more. This is presuming the savings levels for being a big spender that I've heard about. That's a lot of room to work with for some inconvenience.

dzikimarian 3y ago

Depending how small is small business, but I would probably go with VPS.

MaxBarraclough 3y ago

> Extreme case: google, does not use aws for its main load; this upper threshold I wager is couple of orders of magnitude smaller Not a good example in my opinion, as Google is also a major provider of cloud services. AWS isn't the only game in town. I think Disney+ is a more interesting case. A quick google search turns up some articles saying their video streaming is powered by external CDNs. As I understand it, Netflix take the opposite approach and deliver all video data from their own Open Connect CDN, although they use AWS for other workloads (presumably including things like authentication, their recommendation engine, etc).

ipaddr 3y ago

Cloud doesn't make sense for small business. A vps would. If you are spending less than 100,000 you probably don't need it for your 10,000 million or less daily visitors

Turing_Machine 3y ago
If you're spending less than 100,000, you almost certainly aren't spending enough to pay salary + benefits for a sysadmin.
- ipaddr 3y ago
  Why would you need additional people to manage a vps? The person managing amazon can very easily use cpanel because it is much simpler.
- BackBlast 3y ago
  Why does everyone always jump to this fiction? You probably aren't paying a "cloud engineer" just to fiddle with cloud config full time with <$100k/yr spend. Why would you suddenly need a full time sysop to do the same capability level of on-prem? If you do 10 hours of "cloud engineering" a month to support an application, the same capability level of on-prem work is probably in the same ballpark. 5-30 hours. Yes, it can be lower than cloud. No, it's NOT suddenly 160 hours every month. Yes, it does mean you need someone who can wear the extra hat, cloud engineering skills are literally no different in this regard. Internet sites ran on basement and closet servers for years, actual server rooms for larger stuff. The jokes were tripping over power cords and backhoes digging up internet lines were the causes of most outages. It's never been easier to run on-prem than today. It cost a fraction of even budget VPS providers like Hetzner. For certain classes of applications, it's awesome. It's not everyone's cup of tea I'll grant. But if you are inclined to play with hardware or have someone in the org who does, and an extra 2-4 hours of downtime a year isn't that big of a deal (depending on general utility and network available at your chosen site). You can save tons of money.
  - icedchai 3y ago