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With that much data you're paying a fortune for AWS Operations people either way. Every company I've seen that tries to large-scale AWS thing lean ends up drivi

With that much data you're paying a fortune for AWS Operations people either way. Every company I've seen that tries to large-scale AWS thing lean ends up driving themselves into a ditch where they spend millions on contractors, consultants and 3rd party vendors to dig themselves out of. And when they're in that ditch they are neither secure nor reliable.

nostrebored 3y ago
I can set up an S3 bucket, efs, access, and backups, all reliable and geographically distributed in a single working day.
- spicyusername 3y ago
  Yes, indeed. This is exactly the sneaky thing about the cloud. It seems so "simple". Now try doing that for multiple multi-thousand person orgs with competing processes, architectures, product cycles, etc. You'll find very quickly that costs spiral out of control in a very unpredictable and irreversible way. Self-hosting is something a company has much tighter control of the costs for. Most of those costs are known up front as capex purchases and predictable opex expenditures. They tend to seem expensive compared to the PoC S3 demo you just did, but often aren't compared to the actual realized expenses after migrating.
  - nostrebored 3y ago
    … I have owned core product teams in multi thousand person companies and can confidently say that your spiraling costs sound like a lack of planning and product ownership. Platform teams are your friend. Costs being well known for self hosting is just wrong. It completely ignores cost of ownership and tail risk for your infra
scarface_74 3y ago
You’re right. Because every company you have seen with a large scale implementation on AWS must mean that all large companies - including Netflix - are dumb.
- coldtea 3y ago
  Is there an argument in your comment? For my argument not "all large" companies need to be dumb, as in the strawman above. It's enough to make more sense for the average company to do so. And there are tons of companies, large, SME and others, with big data to store, that have no ops or IT department as such, or just a couple of people. They're not going to build datacenters of their own, distribute them globally, research into reliability and failover solutions, add some custom or adapt some third party stack, and so on. The salary for just an extra person could tower their AWS costs.
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    I can’t quite grok from your original comment are you saying that every company who tried to duplicate what AWS does on prem themselves end up spending too much money on consultants etc or are you saying that companies that use AWS still spend too much money on consultants and they don’t have any cost savings?
    - coldtea 3y ago
      Am saying that: - most companies will do better to not try to replicate AWS (or the share of AWS functionality that they need) - most companies aren't tech companies (not talking about the Netflixes and co of the world here) and would botch it, and at best get a costly + high maintenance bad copy
  - vidarh 3y ago
    When I did contracting in this space, my AWS based customers invariably needed far more of my time for similar sized setups than the non-cloud customers. The assumption that the non-cloud users will need to pay for any extra people is the opposite of my experience actually running both types of setup. I used to offer to cut their costs by moving them off AWS, but didn't push it very hard because I made far more money from the ones that insisted on using AWS. Some of them had good reasons. Many were just cargo-culting. You don't need to build datacenters, or rack servers yourself, or even own servers, or even ever having seen your servers in order to have racks of dedicated bare metal colo racks of servers. Plenty of service-providers will rent you those services by the hour, and plenty of server providers will rent or lease-to-own hardware for you, so you get monthly bills. I started working in this space in 1995, and while we've often had servers actually on prem, I've also managed racks worth of servers I've never seen in person, in data centres I've never seen, with the help of "remote hands" provided by colo provider employees I've never met.
coldtea 3y ago
Not if they use for long term storage or datasets, records, files and such. That's if they use for infrastructure e.g. for some web service etc. And even then, it takes much less to use it, than to even begin designing such a solution.

nostrebored 3y ago

I can set up an S3 bucket, efs, access, and backups, all reliable and geographically distributed in a single working day.

spicyusername 3y ago
Yes, indeed. This is exactly the sneaky thing about the cloud. It seems so "simple". Now try doing that for multiple multi-thousand person orgs with competing processes, architectures, product cycles, etc. You'll find very quickly that costs spiral out of control in a very unpredictable and irreversible way. Self-hosting is something a company has much tighter control of the costs for. Most of those costs are known up front as capex purchases and predictable opex expenditures. They tend to seem expensive compared to the PoC S3 demo you just did, but often aren't compared to the actual realized expenses after migrating.
- nostrebored 3y ago
  … I have owned core product teams in multi thousand person companies and can confidently say that your spiraling costs sound like a lack of planning and product ownership. Platform teams are your friend. Costs being well known for self hosting is just wrong. It completely ignores cost of ownership and tail risk for your infra

scarface_74 3y ago

You’re right. Because every company you have seen with a large scale implementation on AWS must mean that all large companies - including Netflix - are dumb.

coldtea 3y ago
Is there an argument in your comment? For my argument not "all large" companies need to be dumb, as in the strawman above. It's enough to make more sense for the average company to do so. And there are tons of companies, large, SME and others, with big data to store, that have no ops or IT department as such, or just a couple of people. They're not going to build datacenters of their own, distribute them globally, research into reliability and failover solutions, add some custom or adapt some third party stack, and so on. The salary for just an extra person could tower their AWS costs.
- scarface_74 3y ago
  I can’t quite grok from your original comment are you saying that every company who tried to duplicate what AWS does on prem themselves end up spending too much money on consultants etc or are you saying that companies that use AWS still spend too much money on consultants and they don’t have any cost savings?
  - coldtea 3y ago
    Am saying that: - most companies will do better to not try to replicate AWS (or the share of AWS functionality that they need) - most companies aren't tech companies (not talking about the Netflixes and co of the world here) and would botch it, and at best get a costly + high maintenance bad copy
- vidarh 3y ago
  When I did contracting in this space, my AWS based customers invariably needed far more of my time for similar sized setups than the non-cloud customers. The assumption that the non-cloud users will need to pay for any extra people is the opposite of my experience actually running both types of setup. I used to offer to cut their costs by moving them off AWS, but didn't push it very hard because I made far more money from the ones that insisted on using AWS. Some of them had good reasons. Many were just cargo-culting. You don't need to build datacenters, or rack servers yourself, or even own servers, or even ever having seen your servers in order to have racks of dedicated bare metal colo racks of servers. Plenty of service-providers will rent you those services by the hour, and plenty of server providers will rent or lease-to-own hardware for you, so you get monthly bills. I started working in this space in 1995, and while we've often had servers actually on prem, I've also managed racks worth of servers I've never seen in person, in data centres I've never seen, with the help of "remote hands" provided by colo provider employees I've never met.

coldtea 3y ago

Not if they use for long term storage or datasets, records, files and such. That's if they use for infrastructure e.g. for some web service etc. And even then, it takes much less to use it, than to even begin designing such a solution.