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Yes, every situation is different, but replacing capacity that you use at peak on AWS will cost you much less to buy, rack, and power yourself considering hardw

Yes, every situation is different, but replacing capacity that you use at peak on AWS will cost you much less to buy, rack, and power yourself considering hardware and hosting costs. Elastic scaling will save you money on AWS, but you generally can't scale everything (databases, caches, storage are harder to elastically scale up and down). And you need to pay at peak for whatever your peak is and deal with additional complexity of elastic scaling to begin with. No doubt you're paying smart people already to figure this out - it doesn't come for free. In any account - if you take a largish box you might rack as an example (Dual-socket Sandy Bridge Xeon, ~256GB RAM, SSD, approximately a cr1.8xlarge), that box costs about $30k annually on AWS. You can buy it for around $8k. Over two years with hosting costs, you're looking at around $10k vs $60k roughly. Numbers work out similarly for other instance types although you would need some scale - perhaps a dozen of these systems - for this to make sense for your application. Netflix I think is a special case - video delivery which they almost certainly don't do from AWS is their biggest cost - api/web traffic would be dwarfed in comparison, so who cares if it's expensive on AWS in that case? They probably enjoy the flexibility of AWS more than the little bit of money they might save by doing it themselves. Many other largish companies have gone the private cloud route; Zynga comes to mind: http://www.informationweek.com/mobile/inside-zyngas-big-move-to-private-cloud/d/d-id/1102899? http://www.informationweek.com/mobile/inside-zyngas-big-move...). It's not the right fit for everybody, but it's a consideration. Hybrid is interesting too -- provision your own hardware for the big iron - and burst into cloud for the rest of it. All the hype of "cloud" makes people think that it's the only and/or best way to do it - certainly not the case for every sort of business.

gtaylor 13y ago
> Yes, every situation is different, but replacing capacity that you use at peak on AWS will cost you much less to buy, rack, and power yourself considering hardware and hosting costs. The important thing to keep in mind with a DIY situation is that there are additional costs besides hardware/rack/space, and a lot of things that you may have a hard time putting a dollar value on (flexibility). It's not accurate to just throw out the cost for a Sandy Bridge Xeon + rack space without factoring in the other stuff (upgrades, maintenance, if you need to add an employee, the lessened mobility, the increased responsibility, etc). At our current scale, if we went the DIY route, we'd need to hire someone else to take over more of the Ops situation for us. An additional employee would cost a lot more than paying AWS a bit more (salary, management overhead, good benefits, communication). We'd also have more "stuff" to worry about, whereas right now our small team spends 98% of our time working on our product, marketing, and sales. This is entirely anecdotal and specific to our situation, but I mention it as an example. > All the hype of "cloud" makes people think that it's the only and/or best way to do it - certainly not the case for every sort of business. I personally can't stand the "cloud" buzz word, because it doesn't adequately describe anything. I am no "cloud" zealot, but on the same token I think some bare-metal-always-wins advocates don't really "get" what AWS is doing or when it's appropriate to use them (even if they appear more expensive at face value). As a developer, I've seen the kind of crazy neat things we can do with the flexibility and the shifting of responsibilities to AWS. For us, AWS is a no-brainer, though we do wish we had a more affordable route to going hybrid than DirectConnect or their dedicated machine offerings. But like I said, I wouldn't dare make a generalized assertion of AWS' value to others based on our situation. Every company/staff/application is different.
- mattbillenstein 13y ago
  I get what AWS offers, I've been a customer there for many years, my point is that as a startup, eventually you figure something out that is more stable and gets some traction (or you hope to at least). At that point, moving to a less flexible but overall vastly cheaper solution is often the answer. So, the question becomes, "How much do I spend on AWS per year?" and something like "If I could hire one person to save me $500k+/year, would I do that?". If you're a small business with an uncertain future, and smallish AWS spend (<$50k/month) -- sure, stay with AWS until you get into the situation I outlined above.

gtaylor 13y ago

> Yes, every situation is different, but replacing capacity that you use at peak on AWS will cost you much less to buy, rack, and power yourself considering hardware and hosting costs. The important thing to keep in mind with a DIY situation is that there are additional costs besides hardware/rack/space, and a lot of things that you may have a hard time putting a dollar value on (flexibility). It's not accurate to just throw out the cost for a Sandy Bridge Xeon + rack space without factoring in the other stuff (upgrades, maintenance, if you need to add an employee, the lessened mobility, the increased responsibility, etc). At our current scale, if we went the DIY route, we'd need to hire someone else to take over more of the Ops situation for us. An additional employee would cost a lot more than paying AWS a bit more (salary, management overhead, good benefits, communication). We'd also have more "stuff" to worry about, whereas right now our small team spends 98% of our time working on our product, marketing, and sales. This is entirely anecdotal and specific to our situation, but I mention it as an example. > All the hype of "cloud" makes people think that it's the only and/or best way to do it - certainly not the case for every sort of business. I personally can't stand the "cloud" buzz word, because it doesn't adequately describe anything. I am no "cloud" zealot, but on the same token I think some bare-metal-always-wins advocates don't really "get" what AWS is doing or when it's appropriate to use them (even if they appear more expensive at face value). As a developer, I've seen the kind of crazy neat things we can do with the flexibility and the shifting of responsibilities to AWS. For us, AWS is a no-brainer, though we do wish we had a more affordable route to going hybrid than DirectConnect or their dedicated machine offerings. But like I said, I wouldn't dare make a generalized assertion of AWS' value to others based on our situation. Every company/staff/application is different.

mattbillenstein 13y ago
I get what AWS offers, I've been a customer there for many years, my point is that as a startup, eventually you figure something out that is more stable and gets some traction (or you hope to at least). At that point, moving to a less flexible but overall vastly cheaper solution is often the answer. So, the question becomes, "How much do I spend on AWS per year?" and something like "If I could hire one person to save me $500k+/year, would I do that?". If you're a small business with an uncertain future, and smallish AWS spend (<$50k/month) -- sure, stay with AWS until you get into the situation I outlined above.