We reduced our server costs by moving away from AWS
levelup.gitconnected.com
We reduced our server costs by moving away from AWS
1–10 of 355 posts
Re: We reduced our server costs by moving away from AWS
#2I'm glad to see more of these types of articles, but at the same time I'm a bit flabbergasted that this isn't obvious for so many people.
These cloud providers are, by definition, charging you more than it would cost you to run it yourself. What you get in return is a guarantee of expertise and an ecosystem.
Re: We reduced our server costs by moving away from AWS
#3I'm glad to see more of these types of articles, but at the same time I'm a bit flabbergasted that this isn't obvious for so many people. These cloud providers are, by definition, charging you more than it would cost you to run it yourself. What you get in return is a guarantee of expertise and an ecosystem.
You also get a lot of finely incremental costs and the ability to grow. Like, can you really buy 0.1% more IT people? Well, yeah if you already have a thousand. Otherwise you have to buy in bigger chunks. So you save money because you can timeshare talent and hardware. And the ability to write a larger check to scale is valuable for consumer facing applications you're hoping by to grow.
Re: We reduced our server costs by moving away from AWS
#4I'm glad to see more of these types of articles, but at the same time I'm a bit flabbergasted that this isn't obvious for so many people. These cloud providers are, by definition, charging you more than it would cost you to run it yourself. What you get in return is a guarantee of expertise and an ecosystem.
I mean, in theory all services are sold to you with the goal of making a profit, so there must be some margin baked in, but AWS has enough margins to run the Amazon retail store as basically a non-profit while also making enough money to finance Bezos's penis rocket rides.
Re: We reduced our server costs by moving away from AWS
#5I feel like there's a middle step missing from this article (or I just missed it reading quickly) - did they build their own data center? Where are these new non-AWS servers physically located?
Re: We reduced our server costs by moving away from AWS
#6I'm glad to see more of these types of articles, but at the same time I'm a bit flabbergasted that this isn't obvious for so many people. These cloud providers are, by definition, charging you more than it would cost you to run it yourself. What you get in return is a guarantee of expertise and an ecosystem.
You also get a lot of finely incremental costs and the ability to grow. Like, can you really buy 0.1% more IT people? Well, yeah if you already have a thousand. Otherwise you have to buy in bigger chunks. So you save money because you can timeshare talent and hardware. And the ability to write a larger check to scale is valuable for consumer facing applications you're hoping by to grow.
And, importantly, you can turn off your commitment to spending in a second.
Re: We reduced our server costs by moving away from AWS
#7I'm glad to see more of these types of articles, but at the same time I'm a bit flabbergasted that this isn't obvious for so many people. These cloud providers are, by definition, charging you more than it would cost you to run it yourself. What you get in return is a guarantee of expertise and an ecosystem.
I think some of this is due to the presence (until just recently) of abundant VC money, encouraging tech companies to trade of money for time by outsourcing their server admin (or part of it, anyway). It's one less thing you have to hire for and spend time getting good corporate policies and procedures on.
But, now that the emphasis seems to have shifted from growth-at-all-costs to where-can-we-cut-costs, I think there may be more organizations with a large enough server load to realize that they can do it cheaper (or even just get a different cloud provider to do it cheaper).
Re: We reduced our server costs by moving away from AWS
#8I find this interesting, if nothing else. My first question is what was the opportunity cost of focusing manpower to setting up on-prem infrastructure that now needs maintained? What on the product roadmap was sacrificed/delayed in exchange for the time on this project? What are the projected future hiring costs to maintain these servers (and applications like Cassandra!) going forward? Nothing is free, and at just 4-5 additional hires they will be giving back a large chunk of that $800k to employees. IDK - maybe that's a fare trade-off to pump up the common man with money instead of the establishment.
Re: We reduced our server costs by moving away from AWS
#9I feel like there's a middle step missing from this article (or I just missed it reading quickly) - did they build their own data center? Where are these new non-AWS servers physically located?
Colo would also be an option. I run a mix of colo and cloud currently.
Re: We reduced our server costs by moving away from AWS
#10I'm glad to see more of these types of articles, but at the same time I'm a bit flabbergasted that this isn't obvious for so many people. These cloud providers are, by definition, charging you more than it would cost you to run it yourself. What you get in return is a guarantee of expertise and an ecosystem.
> These cloud providers are, by definition, charging you more than it would cost you to run it yourself.
That is _not_ a given. They're charging you more than it costs _them_ to run it.
They get:
- much lower hardware prices than you
- lower bandwidth prices than you
- likely lower electricity costs than you