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AWS Transfer for SFTP – Fully Managed SFTP Service for Amazon S3

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Re: AWS Transfer for SFTP – Fully Managed SFTP Service for Amazon S3

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In large business, sure. In small business and education, a $200/mo commitment could easily require approval by the owner or the department chair.

The alternative is developer time. Nothing about managed services is ever less expensive if you don’t account for developer/Devops/netops time saved. A small company has even more of reason to want as many managed services as possible. You can avoid hiring netops if you both have a third party managed service provider to manage your network and you have developers/architects who know enough to fill in the gaps.

On the other hand, netops staff costs are a lot less... is liquid the right word?

Yes, $200/month is probably not any more than a couple hours/month of even a very lowly paid developer or ops person, once you account for benefits and overhead.

But once you needed to hire that person for any reason... their annual salary is already on the books. Giving them more work to do doesn't affect your budget. But another $2400 a year might. Yeah, if you can avoid hiring that person _at all_... but you probably had some reason you did have to hire a person or three already, and now you've got them.

The actual experience of working in a small under-resourced organization, in my experience, often looks like this.

Re: AWS Transfer for SFTP – Fully Managed SFTP Service for Amazon S3

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The alternative is developer time. Nothing about managed services is ever less expensive if you don’t account for developer/Devops/netops time saved. A small company has even more of reason to want as many managed services as possible. You can avoid hiring netops if you both have a third party managed service provider to manage your network and you have developers/architects who know enough to fill in the gaps.

On the other hand, netops staff costs are a lot less... is liquid the right word? Yes, $200/month is probably not any more than a couple hours/month of even a very lowly paid developer or ops person, once you account for benefits and overhead. But once you needed to hire that person for any reason... their annual salary is already on the books. Giving them more work to do doesn't affect your budget. But another $2400…

That’s why you don’t hire them at all. You use an MSP. Even if you do need someone on prem, the simpler you make your infrastructure, the less skilled your netops person has to be. You can hire someone who basically is a help desk person.

When that one netops person leaves, it usually falls on the developers to manage it.

Re: AWS Transfer for SFTP – Fully Managed SFTP Service for Amazon S3

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn’t count on that. These hyperscale players don’t have the time to worry about their “friends”. Example: Do you really think that the warm embrace of VMware Horizon and Citrix on Azure is the beginning of a long and fruitful relationship?

That’s a fair point, but I would look to specific markets instead of tech to see where AWS and Amazon might run into issues. Specifically within healthcare. You think large Pharma companies will use AWS after the pill pocket acquisition? Do you think once Amazon.com starts listing prosthetics large life sciences companies will run on AWS? What about providers? Do you think health systems will choose AWS as their clou…

Do you see Netflix hosting their entire infrastructure on AWS after Amazon released Amazon Video.....

Re: AWS Transfer for SFTP – Fully Managed SFTP Service for Amazon S3

#126
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can you elaborate? I mean a plain CentOS server running SFTP, S3FS seems about as set and forget as it gets. Think about the operational costs: someone needs to manage keys, logging, security updates, when S3FS coughs a lung and hangs you need to catch that problem and remount it to restore service, etc. This service reuses the existing authentication systems so you don't need to spend time configuring and managing…

Instead of s3fs, what's wrong with using the aws s3 cli? That's what we do for our clients' SFTP servers

S3fs means you can use most existing apps without managing local storage. It doesn’t work quite as well in practice but the concept is appealing if you need to support software which wasn’t designed for AWS and uses non-trivial data volumes.

Re: AWS Transfer for SFTP – Fully Managed SFTP Service for Amazon S3

#127
post #3

There are a handful of services out there that do this, I know because I've needed it on multiple occasions. It's nice that Amazon is providing it in house now, but it just reminds of me the last time I went to re:invent and walked through the vendor area and thought about how many of these companies are four dev cycles away from Amazon producing a baked in competitor. Hard to make a B To B Amazon tool these days.

Dave Winer: http://scripting.com/stories/2007/04/04/coexistingWithPlatfo... Sometimes developers choose a niche that's either directly in the path of the vendor, or even worse, on the roadmap of the vendor. In those cases, they don't really deserve our sympathy. It's almost like a game of PR, there's no way you're not going to have a fight on your hands. Further discussed by Joel Spolsky https://www.joelonsoftware.co…

Thanks. At the end of Spolsky's article he mentions a way to survive:

"A good platform always has opportunities for applications that aren’t just gap-fillers. These are the kind of application that the vendor is unlikely ever to consider a core feature, usually because it’s vertical — it’s not something everyone is going to want. There is exactly zero chance that Apple is ever going to add a feature to the iPhone for dentists. Zero."

Re: AWS Transfer for SFTP – Fully Managed SFTP Service for Amazon S3

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dave Winer: http://scripting.com/stories/2007/04/04/coexistingWithPlatfo... Sometimes developers choose a niche that's either directly in the path of the vendor, or even worse, on the roadmap of the vendor. In those cases, they don't really deserve our sympathy. It's almost like a game of PR, there's no way you're not going to have a fight on your hands. Further discussed by Joel Spolsky https://www.joelonsoftware.co…

Thanks. At the end of Spolsky's article he mentions a way to survive: "A good platform always has opportunities for applications that aren’t just gap-fillers. These are the kind of application that the vendor is unlikely ever to consider a core feature, usually because it’s vertical — it’s not something everyone is going to want. There is exactly zero chance that Apple is ever going to add a feature to the iPhone for…

Watch next year at WWDC they integrate a feature into HealthKit that uses the FaceID sensors to tell if you have cavities.....

Re: AWS Transfer for SFTP – Fully Managed SFTP Service for Amazon S3

#130
post #3

There are a handful of services out there that do this, I know because I've needed it on multiple occasions. It's nice that Amazon is providing it in house now, but it just reminds of me the last time I went to re:invent and walked through the vendor area and thought about how many of these companies are four dev cycles away from Amazon producing a baked in competitor. Hard to make a B To B Amazon tool these days.

I wrote a part of our product, actually invested years in it, that does a certain thing I won't say on Amazon's cloud. One day, Amazon released a competing service that does the same thing. There was a flaw in our product that had one of our customers pushing to use Amazon's offering. Turns out Amazon's service cost about 4x what it cost us to do it ourselves. It wasn't obvious at the time given Amazon's purposefully…

I'm curious if you think that Amazon might have actually improved your business, because now you can offer anyone who buys from Amazon better service & price? If you can find them.
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