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We rolled our own proprietary version of what became known as S3 and scaled it up to several thousand nodes. At any given time, less than half a FTE spent any t
by johansch 12y ago
We rolled our own proprietary version of what became known as S3 and scaled it up to several thousand nodes. At any given time, less than half a FTE spent any time on this, and I think we've had roughly equal (probably better) availability than that of S3, at a fraction of the cost.
- eropple 12y agoI spent zero FTEs on S3 and average around twenty-five bucks, or under a third of an FTE's hourly amortized rate, per terabyte. You might not be in "almost everyone", but almost everyone else is.
- nucleardog 12y agoAssuming you pay your engineers a paltry $50k/yr, half of a FTE is $25k/yr. Quick calculation based on the public S3 pricing says that's 847TB of data you could be storing just with their salary. That doesn't include all the actual costs associated with running thousands of nodes - acquisition, hardware replacements, utilities and other operating costs, space, etc. (To be honest, with that many nodes I have a hard time believing that you're not spending half a FTE just replacing dead drives.) Not to mention the additional costs if you're actually interested in the same level of durability (target eleven 9s (99.999999999%), but last time I talked to an engineer they're still at 100% since leaving beta). Multiple DCs, transit between them... I'm sure there's a scale at which it's worth it, but it's pretty far up there and for almost everyone S3 is a cheaper option.