41–50 of 137 posts
Perhaps as a freelance consultant right now I take a sharper look at the costs involved - if a client has, say, $50k to budget on a project, I really don't want $10k of that to go to hosting if it doesn't need to - I'd rather it be available for my services directly (obviously) or to give us more play for marketing, testing, whatever.
I've known a couple of small to medium sized companies where they were using AWS rather strategically as part of their services - dynamically spinning up test environments for running parallel testing, off-peak data crunching, etc - but even in those cases, there weren't gigantic savings vs other options.
What bugs me most is the false dichotomy I get when I talk about this with friends; their choice is presented as either use AWS or "hire a full-time sysadmin, buy multiple server-grade boxes and manage all this in a rented data center". I've been told Amazon is saving people "easily" $100k/year by not having to hire staff and buy expensive hardware. Hrmm... not all hardware is expensive, and instead of hiring a sysadmin, you've now got multiple developers spending time learning the AWS API, and building critical business processes around AWS, tying you to Amazon for the long haul, all while they could be focusing more on line-of-business stuff that you hired them for in the first place.
I don't doubt that in some cases there's robust cost savings, but it's never struck me as a terribly cost-efficient way of doing any web stuff. In some cases it may be the only way to deal with certain problems, but in those cases cost probably isn't a consideration anyway.
Not surprised to see this, although I am surprised more companies aren't following suit. We abandoned AWS a year and a half ago and cut our server / infrastructure costs by 90% in the process.
folks... NOBODY gives a fuck about you at those companies, and you better believe it. not the account manager, not the engineer working on your 5 day old ticket, not the sales guy who probably isn't even paid a decent commission, and certainly not the executive management who is pulling down 300k+/year annual salaries plus huge stock grants and bonuses (check out the SEC filings!)
a well managed cluster of computing equipment running baremetal operating systems, hypervisors of your choice, and maybe something like openstack or docker is both profitable for the vendor and a MASSIVE price reduction for the customer.
if you know what you're doing, you're spending $10k/month for $100k/month worth of equivalent amazon services. yes, you heard me right. it is an order of magnitude of cost savings. once you scale past $10k/month, using amazon for all your needs is an INCREDIBLY STUPID business decision.
the genius of AWS, of course, is that they disguise all their marketing as technical spec sheets and deliberately design their collateral and sales process to appeal to the "engineer" types with acronyms, numbers, and highly specific jargon.
it's quite clever. but not clever enough to fool everyone. and those that are fooled, learn eventually that maybe paying 300% more than you should isn't that smart.
My employer spends a small fortune with AWS, and we make use of many of the services. There's no way our small team could have built our product on any other platform. Still, as my colleague observed, it must be the only business in the world you can spend $1m a year on and get only basic support, with web-only tickets that take hours or days to get a resolved.
did you actually try, or are you just rationalizing your enormous AWS spend?
Public cloud is not for everyone. If you have a large number of machines that have to run all the time and are being taxed, then public cloud services do not make sense. If you are doing complex machine learning, large scale web crawling/scrapping, or generating large quantities of data (images/video/etc.) then services like AWS might not be a fit. They are incredibly awesome though for certain types of workload, but…
It's for people not making enough money (or not having the clue) to hire systems talent. If you read the Moz report, they appear to have gotten a new CEO and are now building out a datacenter presence. They spent 7MM+/yr on AWS in 2013, there is no way that won't be viciously slashed by renting racks.
Yeah, this isn't really surprising. As soon as the convenience/expertise 'tax' exceeds hiring your own, it makes sense to make the jump.
Are people surprised that big enough organizations have their own accountants or lawyers?
I bet one of the leading factors is the number of sites blocking the AWS servers. As a scraping service, the fact that Amazon makes all their public IPs known ( https://forums.aws.amazon.com/ann.jspa?annID=1701 ) is really inconvenient for anyone "crawling" the web. Rackspace also makes their list available, albeit incomplete ( http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/article/cloud-site... ). As more websites setup…
We've actually never crawled out of Amazon (mostly because it was expensive to do so), so the crawl blocking stuff is unrelated, at least for us. As Sarah noted, it's really been costs, service, and support issues.
there are dozens, if not hundreds of smaller TRUE managed hosting providers popping up to service these kinds of accounts. that's what my startup does. we routinely steal large $5k-50k/month accounts from AWS and rackspace and softlayer (IBM) and the like. they just do a shitty job for an exorbitant price, plain and simple. folks... NOBODY gives a fuck about you at those companies, and you better believe it. not the…
Disclaimer: Been using OVH for the past year. Sure, there's downtime (like 1 hour every couple of months), but it's so cheap I can afford a lot of redundancy.
For our longer stateful processing or apps that need to be available 24/7 with no variability in load we have purchased our own hardware (a process that has been going on for over 18 months). Owning the equipment plus the data center will run us approx 1.2 million including growth to build a hot back up.
It should be noted, staffing cost was not a factor. We must have staff to manage 1000s of servers at AWS or at our own data centers. The biggest factor was paying for compute on boxes that crashed and yielded nothing we could use to move our business forward. Well, I take that back, we got really good at check points and rollbacks. Other than that, not much.
No matter how you slice it, AWS and other cloud services are a great service for the right types of processing, and applications.
Skinner Moz CTO