31–40 of 218 posts
I guess part of the problem with that is the cost of maintaining different platforms, but there are ways around that.
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…
>You are not Dropbox 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 p…
The real secret is that compute isn't the driving factor in cost - its bandwidth. I've had too many conversations where people are congratulating themselves on their $0.027/GB PPA only to explain that they are paying effectively $8.00/Mbps for a network link. The real threshold is network consumption and when you cross it figuring out a hybrid strategy is the best path.
So they saved next to nothing? Their yearly operating expenses are in the order of $1.3B, which doesn't even include cost of revenue. $75M savings versus $2600M operating expenses over those 2 years comes out to about 2.8% 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.
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?
"Cloud" providers are so much more than just the hardware. There are probably a lot of AWS customers who could absolutely save lots of money if they took all their cloud servers and magically made them physical on-prem servers. But then they might hit a situation like:
"We need to create a whole new prod-sized cluster for load testing but only for a day". Do you rack all those servers, do the test, then take them off and bin them? Or what?
I'm tempted to go on and on with similar examples but imo the biggest deal with cloud providers is that they can operate at such an insane infra scale that it lets you treat extremely large quantities of servers like an abstraction instead of a physical metal box that needs to be bottle-fed and rocked to sleep at night lest it get cranky.
I think at fairly small scales it's easy to build in-house systems that let you treat servers like abstract units as long as you're not trying to 2+x your infra dynamically. But cloud solutions let you do that because your scale <<< the cloud providers' scale even at pretty large values of scale for any one company.
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…
It's not to offset risks, if you have very little load (a site with 10k visits a day, for example), you can share the costs on the cloud and save nearly the entire bill.
Companies with a high revenue/load ratio tend to stay at the cloud even after they get big. That is because even though the cloud is very expensive for their needs, it adds speed on their internal processes by saving the time to decide and buy equipment. But when that ratio is small, they just can't afford it.
So they saved next to nothing? Their yearly operating expenses are in the order of $1.3B, which doesn't even include cost of revenue. $75M savings versus $2600M operating expenses over those 2 years comes out to about 2.8% savings.