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I worked for a large web company where the busiest traffic day of the year was 20x a normal day. And, the busiest hour of that busy day was 100x normal. So, t

I worked for a large web company where the busiest traffic day of the year was 20x a normal day. And, the busiest hour of that busy day was 100x normal. So, they had a whole bunch of excess data center capacity hanging around to handle just a handful of days a year. For them, the value of not owning the cloud (along with on-demand provisioning) is that they can significantly reduce hardware usage.

jerf 18y ago
Locally-run clouds can rent their capacity back out to somebody else who doesn't care about these issues as easily as they can migrate services and push data around (again, all depending on software not written and with a lot of people who don't want to see it written). Definitely another advantage to outsourcing your cloud operations. If you're getting a gut reaction against the idea of people running around on your hardware, that exact same gut reaction should be applied to your stuff running around in somebody else's cloud.
- ShabbyDoo 18y ago
  We outsourced the physical data center but owned and operated the servers. There would have been no issue with other people's stuff running, and the company had even considered it (for simulations, etc.). Our costs were much higher than Amazon's, I suspect. While we might have bought a couple hundred servers at a time, Amazon probably buys thousands. They can buy bandwidth cheaply and probably even power. Open standards are nice and all, but worrying about running a datacenter stinks. It's a huge management overhead among the zillions of other problems. Even signing the contracts to have it managed is a pain. "Locally-run clouds can rent their capacity back out" I'll buy capacity from Amazon, but probably not from Joe Blow. More management overhead to sell capacity back. There would have to be an intermediary, but even then it would be a pain. Amazon's lock-in/switching costs are mild problems compared to the issues of dealing with one's own datacenter. Everybody I worked with would have much rather spent their time making the apps better.

jerf 18y ago

Locally-run clouds can rent their capacity back out to somebody else who doesn't care about these issues as easily as they can migrate services and push data around (again, all depending on software not written and with a lot of people who don't want to see it written). Definitely another advantage to outsourcing your cloud operations. If you're getting a gut reaction against the idea of people running around on your hardware, that exact same gut reaction should be applied to your stuff running around in somebody else's cloud.

ShabbyDoo 18y ago
We outsourced the physical data center but owned and operated the servers. There would have been no issue with other people's stuff running, and the company had even considered it (for simulations, etc.). Our costs were much higher than Amazon's, I suspect. While we might have bought a couple hundred servers at a time, Amazon probably buys thousands. They can buy bandwidth cheaply and probably even power. Open standards are nice and all, but worrying about running a datacenter stinks. It's a huge management overhead among the zillions of other problems. Even signing the contracts to have it managed is a pain. "Locally-run clouds can rent their capacity back out" I'll buy capacity from Amazon, but probably not from Joe Blow. More management overhead to sell capacity back. There would have to be an intermediary, but even then it would be a pain. Amazon's lock-in/switching costs are mild problems compared to the issues of dealing with one's own datacenter. Everybody I worked with would have much rather spent their time making the apps better.