101–110 of 218 posts
- Dropbox saves $50M/year in AWS costs
- Dropbox spends $200K/year (salary, benefits, equipment, SaaS, etc.) for their average infrastructure engineer
Following those assumptions, Dropbox must hire Of course, these assumptions may be wrong (please correct them if so!) and this entirely ignores the unique computing needs of Dropbox's business, which may be unique vs. anything available off the shelf.
Protip: If your business is storage, that is your core competency. Don't pay someone else for it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You’ve described the historical value of cloud computing perfectly. That said, I think the days where all but the largest or most stubborn companies run their own datacenters are coming to a close. The problem will be finding skilled labor. Short-haul networking, power configurations, thermal load, hardware maintenance; these and many more are specific skills that can’t be learned overnight. Data center work used to…
I'm not in the web or cloud business, but I've filled a rack with my stuff before. My impression is that hardware has become a lot more capable even relative to its tasks. With high iops memory, many cores and obscene amounts of RAM, I would expect companies of a much larger scale (in $, FTEs, or most other metrics) can be served by one 4HE machine, or by one rack, or by one room. Thus I would expect the knowledge of…
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Why must Amazon pass off its savings to your org, in this example, rather than taking most of those realized R&D savings to their own investors? Sure, AWS may be constantly innovating on doing things more cheaply and scalably. Sometimes, those savings get passed off to the customer; but not most of it, and not necessarily all that frequently.
> ... and not necessarily all that frequently. Did you miss where AWS reduces prices multiple times a year? I don't know the latest figure, but as of 2018, they reduced prices 67 times since launch in 2006.
The only S3 price reduction I can find was in 2012 https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-s3-price-reduction/
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Here's another way that you're not Dropbox (unless you are): you are not a public company that gets points from investors for removing [$35M] dollars from COGS (cost of goods sold), even if you spend [$40M] on R&D + capitalized expenditures to replace it. Stories like this can be really misleading because large companies almost can't help but trick themselves into financial shenanigans. It's very possible that Dropbo…
Why must Amazon pass off its savings to your org, in this example, rather than taking most of those realized R&D savings to their own investors? Sure, AWS may be constantly innovating on doing things more cheaply and scalably. Sometimes, those savings get passed off to the customer; but not most of it, and not necessarily all that frequently.
Amazon competes with other cloud providers and with build-your-own continually, and use price segmentation to stay on the right side of the equation for as many people as possible, while still skimming as much premium for themselves from each user group. Historically, that’s meant big price drops in most categories that would make most one off investments obsolete - while still keeping a ton for themselves.
It also helps that S3 is an anchor product that helps them sell higher margin stuff.
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Bigger you are bigger the differences between teams and products and projects. You can leverage the high quality network infrastructure from Google while using your own DC for Compute Heavy Load. Use Azure for your Windows specific workloads. Go with AliCloud in China. You need to be big enough so that running it yourself is doable with a certain amount of quality. Which does imply many teams and workloads.
My employer does have a luxury of focus in its product offering, though we do have a moderately heterogeneous approach in development, certainly compared to many of the peers that operate at similar scale. Heterogeneity in compute location has a multiplicative effect on accounting, security, capacity management, network management and is dilutive in terms of expertise -- instead of being able to justify the worlds le…
Or so that you are not dependend on only one.
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…
You’ve described the historical value of cloud computing perfectly. That said, I think the days where all but the largest or most stubborn companies run their own datacenters are coming to a close. The problem will be finding skilled labor. Short-haul networking, power configurations, thermal load, hardware maintenance; these and many more are specific skills that can’t be learned overnight. Data center work used to…
There's some other huge arguments against running your own datacenters.
One is being able to properly provision resources. Being able to write just a function and have it consume just that tiny amount of resources rather than a whole VM is huge. Being able to spin instances up and down as you need them is huge.
I think that's been obvious for a long time, but what I've seen less obvious to the business analysts is the impact of more advanced cloud services. The direction of cloud computing is managed services where they run your databases, container platforms, etc for you. Trying to run a huge Cassandra cluster or Kubernetes cluster takes up a ton of expensive labor's time and there's a good chance the cloud providers are a lot better at it than you.
Sure, cloud services tend to be really expensive, and besides cost, there's also concern about things like vendor lock-in, IP protection/data privacy, and ability to tweak the small details of your platform. But cloud platforms in 2020 have a lot more features than in 2010 and in 2030 will have even more. The direction is pretty obvious. Running your own datacenters will be about as common as running your own power plant.
Can you save a few bucks on server costs? Sure. But most of the world has moved beyond caring about servers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You’ve described the historical value of cloud computing perfectly. That said, I think the days where all but the largest or most stubborn companies run their own datacenters are coming to a close. The problem will be finding skilled labor. Short-haul networking, power configurations, thermal load, hardware maintenance; these and many more are specific skills that can’t be learned overnight. Data center work used to…
I'm not in the web or cloud business, but I've filled a rack with my stuff before. My impression is that hardware has become a lot more capable even relative to its tasks. With high iops memory, many cores and obscene amounts of RAM, I would expect companies of a much larger scale (in $, FTEs, or most other metrics) can be served by one 4HE machine, or by one rack, or by one room. Thus I would expect the knowledge of…
https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-ar...
Very few web apps will ever serve as much traffic as SO.
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…