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That was my first thought, too. Physical hardware == more staff. Also consider the risk management of keeping your security up to date, and the opportunity cost
by beat 13y ago
That was my first thought, too. Physical hardware == more staff. Also consider the risk management of keeping your security up to date, and the opportunity costs of making it easy to use for developers. Spend some time in old-school enterprise, and you'll see just how much pain and grief can happen.
Remember, Amazon built its cloud not for the public, but for itself! The cloud gave them a clean separation of duties and cost management between application development and operations. That sort of thing can save large amounts of money and bureaucratic headache. They started selling AWS to the public only after they had a stable system that could produce excess capacity, which could then be resold.
- purple_horse 13y agoWith modern tools like Fully Automatic Install and Ansible/Puppet it shouldn't be any more than for a Cloud service.
- beat 13y agoBut once you have a legacy system, getting the modern tools in there can be a real pain. Instant snowflake, just add expensive and archaic enterprise middleware.
- purple_horse 13y agoTrue, but the article is talking about a startup building from scratch.
- simonebrunozzi 13y agoThe "excess capacity" is a pure myth. When AWS started, it was using a set of Data Centers which had nothing to do with Amazon.com (the Retail part of it). Now Amazon.com is just another (big) customer of AWS. Disclaimer: I work for AWS.