21–30 of 218 posts
I remember Gitlab blogged that they are going to use baremetal instead of Azure with some numbers showing benefit of doing so. AFAIK they quickly reversed decision and didn't even try to implement that plan, moved to GCP instead.
Just as a reminder: You are not Dropbox. You personally need to run the numbers with both scenarios. Depending on your use case, it may be cheaper to be in AWS, and it may be cheaper to be co-located. If you are as big as Dropbox, it may be cheaper to build your own data center. It reminds me of the arguments for and against K8s. Most of the discussion is based on use case, and not considering the solution space for…
That may actually work the opposite way. The big guys can negotiate pricing with the cloud providers to the point where they may be running at close to cost. It's the small and mid tiers that get hosed with cloud pricing.
>You personally need to run the numbers with both scenarios. Depending on your use case, it may be cheaper to be in AWS
I'm not sure about that. Certainly cloud infrastructure provides a level of flexibility which may be advantageous if you're going through high rate of growth. Outside of that, I'm not sure you'd see any cost savings.
Dropbox is a unique case where majority cost is storage/bandwidth by one product/team. If you have a large organization where cost is divided in 100s of teams and products, cloud (vendor/managed) will be beneficial in removing lot of bureaucracy.
So either it's not $75m or it was a bad idea.
Does anyone know what the break-even point is for building/managing your own infrastructure, vs. using cloud services? I'm also curious - what's the rough time/cost of moving to your own infrastructure? I'm sure it depends on lots of things, but looking for a ballpark. 1 year + 10 engineers? 5 years + 100 engineers?
I mean, the more important question for me is, is running your own infrastructure something that should be a core competency. For Dropbox, the answer seems like an obvious yes. I mean, virtually their entire product is around data storage. I would be shocked if they COULDN'T save money to build a storage system tailored to their needs.
Of course it’s cheaper. Compare the cost of an enterprise NAS vs external hdd from bestbuy. It’s a similar comparison here
Sure, you can buy and colocate a dual processor Xeon Platinum bought from Dell, but when you can get significantly more than twice the performance per dollar buying an Epyc system, it's stupid to do it.
Stop comparing "cloud" to bad business decisions, and start comparing it to business decisions which would be made by people who want to get things done without ego.
I think this quote really hits the nail on the head and confirms what a lot of people may have intuitively known about the value of cloud providers: But once certain startups turn into big companies with hundreds of millions of users, with computing needs that they’ve come to intimately understand, it can be far more efficient to set up computing infrastructure designed exactly with those needs in mind. I think the m…
There are not a lot of those companies which are that big. You also might not want to manage that many it experts for your infrastructure or you are not able to get them. Also if your companies product is very technical, i would argue that those companies are much better equiped doing it by themselfs then others. Nonetheless, it also doesn't need to be all or nothing. You can easily combine a MultiCloud approach. Bui…
There may be reasons to go multicloud but ease isn’t one of them. You double your infra support overhead (or more likely, half its quality) and have a “least common denominator” experience.
The natural tendencies of large organizations is a diffusion of investment but the cheapest costs frequently come from a concentration of investment.