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Tech changes faster than almost any other industry, which is great for premium brands like Apple as you can keep redefining the minimum baseline performance. R

Tech changes faster than almost any other industry, which is great for premium brands like Apple as you can keep redefining the minimum baseline performance. Remember computers in the hey-day of the PC? Every two years brought a huge tangible improvement. Programs made for new computers just wouldn't run on old PCs, or if they did would be unusably slow. That ended sometime around the release of the Core 2, except for niche users (gamers, developers, etc.) It's the same thing for phones right now. A phone that is more than a few years old just feels like a piece of crap to use; it's slow, the screen is poor, and it doesn't support new features. Good times for manufacturers! (Though we are very rapidly getting to the end of this cycle, IMHO). Same thing applies to AWS, brought up as an example in the post. The base price is not really the issue -- AWS prices fall slower than Moore's law and it is still more expensive that bare metal. It's the new toys you get every year that make AWS attractive. AWS keeps providing more and more pieces of your infrastructure at attractive price points with less admin overhead. At some point they'll have reimplemented everything the modern company needs and then they too will be subject to more serious competition.

deitcher 12y ago
I never considered that point. Do AWS prices fall slower than Moore's law, and do they fall slower than the prices of the underlying equipment? I have managed a goodly number of AWS implementations and considerations ("should we do it or not?"). AWS was cheaper in most cases not because of bare metal vs AWS, but because of the sheer efficiency of scale, and not having to hire staff and expertise to manage all of the infrastructure. Hmm... you just inspired a new post. Thanks, noelwelsh!
- toomuchtodo 12y ago
  > AWS was cheaper in most cases not because of bare metal vs AWS, but because of the sheer efficiency of scale, and not having to hire staff and expertise to manage all of the infrastructure. Once you get to a certain scale, you're hiring admins either way. The only question is whether you're hiring AWS admins or you're hiring bare metal sys|network|linux admins.
  - deitcher 12y ago
    Yes, definitely. But it is cheaper to have sufficient admins to manage 100 VM instances, than sufficient admins to manage 100 VM instances plus the underlying 20 physical servers and 3 switches and 2 routers and 2 firewalls and storage arrays and... I always found beyond a certain scale that AWS was not cheaper, but lately I am questioning even that. Next client who is considering going public cloud, I will need to redo my spreadsheets.
  - exelius 12y ago
    AWS admins are cheaper and you need fewer of them. With AWS, you don't have to stand up and maintain an entire layer of infrastructure management tools; all you really have is config management. You definitely have to hire a lot less staff with AWS, ESPECIALLY when you're in that "in-between" phase where you're starting to build out a tech ops organization. You don't have those step functions where you have a huge need for some vendor-specific technology knowledge, but not enough work to justify a full time employee. AWS provides an abstraction layer that you need to have anyway: the difference is that you don't have to BUILD that layer, it was there from day one.
    - toomuchtodo 12y ago
      > AWS admins are cheaper and you need fewer of them. I have yet to find an AWS Infrastructure Admin job for under $120K/year (SF, LA, CHI, Boston, NY were the locales I looked in). I have seen quite a few traditional sysadmin jobs under $100K/year. > You definitely have to hire a lot less staff with AWS, This has traditionally been true of Linux admins in general. I'm not seeing that much of a difference in the marketplace between Linux admin and AWS admin compensation packages at the moment, except AWS admin positions are usually offered by startups and included equity you wouldn't get at a typical enterprise position. Disclaimer: I do DevOps/AWS/Infrastructure/Etc.
      - exelius 12y ago
        Yeah, I started out my career as a system admin and the AWS infrastructure stuff always made me fear my job was going to disappear. In reality, it's just made people aware that the skillset most system admins have were closer to those of a software developer anyway. As everything moves to the DevOps model, I find that under DevOps, "AWS Admin" as a job goes away, and your developers all just know a lot about more about AWS since that's part of the underlying stack. AWS is a lot easier for developers to conceptualize as well - they're just logical objects that can be created/destroyed like programmatic objects can. Used to be that if you needed a new server, you'd have to talk to your sysadmin and get a VM provisioned, keys issued, etc. but with AWS all you have to do is issue a method to a class in your framework of choice (since AWS has SDK libraries for most languages/frameworks), and the VM is created, provisioned and integrated into your application like no work needed to happen.
slgeorge 12y ago
I think you're totally right. There's a product manager somewhere in AWS whose using the comparison "total cost and productivity of managing own infrastructure" vs AWS. That means cost of people building/managing servers, but also goes much higher up the stack into the other services they provide from backup, content distribution, etc. In fact, Amazon is commoditising simple IaaS because that comparison would be AWS vs "Buying my own server and plugging it at the datacentre" which would be a lot less compelling. They want to drive the first comparison, while stopping others getting started in the second one.

deitcher 12y ago

I never considered that point. Do AWS prices fall slower than Moore's law, and do they fall slower than the prices of the underlying equipment? I have managed a goodly number of AWS implementations and considerations ("should we do it or not?"). AWS was cheaper in most cases not because of bare metal vs AWS, but because of the sheer efficiency of scale, and not having to hire staff and expertise to manage all of the infrastructure. Hmm... you just inspired a new post. Thanks, noelwelsh!

toomuchtodo 12y ago
> AWS was cheaper in most cases not because of bare metal vs AWS, but because of the sheer efficiency of scale, and not having to hire staff and expertise to manage all of the infrastructure. Once you get to a certain scale, you're hiring admins either way. The only question is whether you're hiring AWS admins or you're hiring bare metal sys|network|linux admins.
- deitcher 12y ago
  Yes, definitely. But it is cheaper to have sufficient admins to manage 100 VM instances, than sufficient admins to manage 100 VM instances plus the underlying 20 physical servers and 3 switches and 2 routers and 2 firewalls and storage arrays and... I always found beyond a certain scale that AWS was not cheaper, but lately I am questioning even that. Next client who is considering going public cloud, I will need to redo my spreadsheets.
- exelius 12y ago
  AWS admins are cheaper and you need fewer of them. With AWS, you don't have to stand up and maintain an entire layer of infrastructure management tools; all you really have is config management. You definitely have to hire a lot less staff with AWS, ESPECIALLY when you're in that "in-between" phase where you're starting to build out a tech ops organization. You don't have those step functions where you have a huge need for some vendor-specific technology knowledge, but not enough work to justify a full time employee. AWS provides an abstraction layer that you need to have anyway: the difference is that you don't have to BUILD that layer, it was there from day one.
  - toomuchtodo 12y ago
    > AWS admins are cheaper and you need fewer of them. I have yet to find an AWS Infrastructure Admin job for under $120K/year (SF, LA, CHI, Boston, NY were the locales I looked in). I have seen quite a few traditional sysadmin jobs under $100K/year. > You definitely have to hire a lot less staff with AWS, This has traditionally been true of Linux admins in general. I'm not seeing that much of a difference in the marketplace between Linux admin and AWS admin compensation packages at the moment, except AWS admin positions are usually offered by startups and included equity you wouldn't get at a typical enterprise position. Disclaimer: I do DevOps/AWS/Infrastructure/Etc.
    - exelius 12y ago
      Yeah, I started out my career as a system admin and the AWS infrastructure stuff always made me fear my job was going to disappear. In reality, it's just made people aware that the skillset most system admins have were closer to those of a software developer anyway. As everything moves to the DevOps model, I find that under DevOps, "AWS Admin" as a job goes away, and your developers all just know a lot about more about AWS since that's part of the underlying stack. AWS is a lot easier for developers to conceptualize as well - they're just logical objects that can be created/destroyed like programmatic objects can. Used to be that if you needed a new server, you'd have to talk to your sysadmin and get a VM provisioned, keys issued, etc. but with AWS all you have to do is issue a method to a class in your framework of choice (since AWS has SDK libraries for most languages/frameworks), and the VM is created, provisioned and integrated into your application like no work needed to happen.

slgeorge 12y ago

I think you're totally right. There's a product manager somewhere in AWS whose using the comparison "total cost and productivity of managing own infrastructure" vs AWS. That means cost of people building/managing servers, but also goes much higher up the stack into the other services they provide from backup, content distribution, etc. In fact, Amazon is commoditising simple IaaS because that comparison would be AWS vs "Buying my own server and plugging it at the datacentre" which would be a lot less compelling. They want to drive the first comparison, while stopping others getting started in the second one.