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Do you have a source or some insight you could share as to when a company should move away from AWS? A quick google search turns up $1000 per square foot[1] for

by __john 12y ago

Do you have a source or some insight you could share as to when a company should move away from AWS? A quick google search turns up $1000 per square foot[1] for a buidling a datacenter. There's also a nice discussion on reddit[2], but there's no talk of cost. I think this is an interesting economics? problem and would like to hear more on it if anyone has the time. [1]http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=920078 http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=920078 [2]http://redd.it/16m9pq http://redd.it/16m9pq

liveoneggs 12y ago
I can tell you that you can rent an entire rack with power for $500-$1000/month (42U); A decent internet connection from level3 or the colo house internet for another few hundred. So even at $2k/month we've still got $180k/month to buy servers and storage (or $2M for the year). $200k/month is a lot of money.
- eli 12y ago
  What if your usage isn't evenly distributed across a month?
  - Zombieball 12y ago
    Then you rent out excess capacity in some sort of IAAS business model like, oh wait... AWS!
  - vampirechicken 12y ago
    Chances are that your colo datacenter is building out an openstack-based cloud offering. So you build your colo'd private cloud on openstack, and then use their's to handle surges. As your traffic grows, you add your own gear to handle the base line. But ~200K per month, you're operating at a very different scale from 2k or even 20k. Having a couple of idle servers 23 hours a day is not wasteful at that scale, unless your CIO is Ebeneezer Scrooge.
  - liveoneggs 12y ago
    aws is a good fit if you have big spikes and massive lulls.. maybe.
- scott_s 12y ago
  It is, but I can conceive of large companies paying it because they don't also want to employ, in-house, the people necessary to maintain the physical infrastructure.
  - liveoneggs 12y ago
    you also need people to babysit, manage, and build out ec2 instances. They are constantly failing, being retired, getting random poor performance, etcetcetc. The failure rates vs physical hardware are incredibly high (just personal experience but I doubt you'll find many who disagree). Once your systems are up and running you don't need to do much. Remote hands will replace a hard drive for $100, for example.
- anko 12y ago
  What the crap? Look what you are saying is crazy. 1) you aren't including operations staff. 2) what are you doing for DR/HA? 3) how about CDN etc? 4) how about load balancing between datacenters? DNS failover? 5) how many units of computer would $200k be at amazon? I'd imagine a lot. I recently (nearly a year ago) specced out 16 servers on AWS with HA/DR on opsworks for $15k over 3 years ($5k/year). Back of the envelope calculations make that 640 cores for your $200k. With 400GB transfer a month. 6) what are you doing for backups? 7) what if you don't need to utilize a whole rack? Most of the time systems don't fully utilize racks. But you're paying for them anyway.
  - liveoneggs 12y ago
    I think you should keep using the cloud but I'll respond to your points anyway. 1- you still need staff to deal with aws. I would argue that you need more. 2- HA is the same; DR is different. Use AWS for your DR ;) 3- What about them? there is literally no difference 4- see 3 5- a lot, I'm sure. Enough to justify owned physical equipment that you aren't sharing and doesn't get "retired" every other week 6- whatever I want, including putting them on glacier or sending them to my data center's cheap tape storage 7- it's a trivial part of the cost, why worry about it? or rent half a rack if you don't mind taking on a little extra cord-pulling risk

by __john 12y ago

liveoneggs 12y ago

I can tell you that you can rent an entire rack with power for $500-$1000/month (42U); A decent internet connection from level3 or the colo house internet for another few hundred. So even at $2k/month we've still got $180k/month to buy servers and storage (or $2M for the year). $200k/month is a lot of money.

eli 12y ago
What if your usage isn't evenly distributed across a month?
- Zombieball 12y ago
  Then you rent out excess capacity in some sort of IAAS business model like, oh wait... AWS!
- vampirechicken 12y ago
  Chances are that your colo datacenter is building out an openstack-based cloud offering. So you build your colo'd private cloud on openstack, and then use their's to handle surges. As your traffic grows, you add your own gear to handle the base line. But ~200K per month, you're operating at a very different scale from 2k or even 20k. Having a couple of idle servers 23 hours a day is not wasteful at that scale, unless your CIO is Ebeneezer Scrooge.
- liveoneggs 12y ago
  aws is a good fit if you have big spikes and massive lulls.. maybe.
scott_s 12y ago
It is, but I can conceive of large companies paying it because they don't also want to employ, in-house, the people necessary to maintain the physical infrastructure.
- liveoneggs 12y ago
  you also need people to babysit, manage, and build out ec2 instances. They are constantly failing, being retired, getting random poor performance, etcetcetc. The failure rates vs physical hardware are incredibly high (just personal experience but I doubt you'll find many who disagree). Once your systems are up and running you don't need to do much. Remote hands will replace a hard drive for $100, for example.
anko 12y ago
What the crap? Look what you are saying is crazy. 1) you aren't including operations staff. 2) what are you doing for DR/HA? 3) how about CDN etc? 4) how about load balancing between datacenters? DNS failover? 5) how many units of computer would $200k be at amazon? I'd imagine a lot. I recently (nearly a year ago) specced out 16 servers on AWS with HA/DR on opsworks for $15k over 3 years ($5k/year). Back of the envelope calculations make that 640 cores for your $200k. With 400GB transfer a month. 6) what are you doing for backups? 7) what if you don't need to utilize a whole rack? Most of the time systems don't fully utilize racks. But you're paying for them anyway.
- liveoneggs 12y ago
  I think you should keep using the cloud but I'll respond to your points anyway. 1- you still need staff to deal with aws. I would argue that you need more. 2- HA is the same; DR is different. Use AWS for your DR ;) 3- What about them? there is literally no difference 4- see 3 5- a lot, I'm sure. Enough to justify owned physical equipment that you aren't sharing and doesn't get "retired" every other week 6- whatever I want, including putting them on glacier or sending them to my data center's cheap tape storage 7- it's a trivial part of the cost, why worry about it? or rent half a rack if you don't mind taking on a little extra cord-pulling risk