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How and Why Swiftype Moved from EC2 to Real Hardware

highscalability.com

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Re: How and Why Swiftype Moved from EC2 to Real Hardware

#81

Post by deitcher »

skwirl wrote: post #69
snoopybbt wrote: post #43

There's not much need for a fancy article on a fancy website in order to understand a key concept of cloud computing: Cloud computing offers you the great and awesome advantages of being able to instantly scale your application, replicate your data and basically just grow according to your business volume, and all this without significant investments, delivery time, setup time, people time, maintenance or anything bu…

>you're also paying Amazon's profits. Are you? Amazon is not known for posting profits, and is quite possibly operating AWS at a loss. They have promised to show financial results for AWS itself with the quarterly report being released next month, so we'll see.

Amazon is not know for posting operating profits, because they plow funds back into new research and businesses. But they most definitely operate with gross margins on everything they sell.

Update: in FY2014, they sold $89BN ($70.1BN in products, $18.9BN in services), and their cost of sales was $62.8BN. I am pretty sure that their margins are razor-thin in retail, but the service side had higher margins.

Re: How and Why Swiftype Moved from EC2 to Real Hardware

#83

Post by toomuchtodo »

kovyrin wrote: post #66
snoopybbt wrote: post #43

There's not much need for a fancy article on a fancy website in order to understand a key concept of cloud computing: Cloud computing offers you the great and awesome advantages of being able to instantly scale your application, replicate your data and basically just grow according to your business volume, and all this without significant investments, delivery time, setup time, people time, maintenance or anything bu…

If only it were that simple... But every second relatively young engineer I interview points out that "But Netflix! Look how good the cloud works for them!" and once again I need to explain, that Netflix spends millions in engineering resources cost to handle EC2 issues and we are not (almost nobody is) Netflix (yet?).

Oh thank goodness. I thought I was the only one.

Re: How and Why Swiftype Moved from EC2 to Real Hardware

#84

Post by lordnacho »

skwirl wrote: post #69
snoopybbt wrote: post #43

There's not much need for a fancy article on a fancy website in order to understand a key concept of cloud computing: Cloud computing offers you the great and awesome advantages of being able to instantly scale your application, replicate your data and basically just grow according to your business volume, and all this without significant investments, delivery time, setup time, people time, maintenance or anything bu…

>you're also paying Amazon's profits. Are you? Amazon is not known for posting profits, and is quite possibly operating AWS at a loss. They have promised to show financial results for AWS itself with the quarterly report being released next month, so we'll see.

The reason they're not making profits as a company is they're spending the money on new projects.

That doesn't mean the AWS part is in itself unprofitable. I'd wager it is, given how the business is somewhat mature and they have a huge chunk of that market.

Re: How and Why Swiftype Moved from EC2 to Real Hardware

#85

Post by toomuchtodo »

skwirl wrote: post #69
snoopybbt wrote: post #43

There's not much need for a fancy article on a fancy website in order to understand a key concept of cloud computing: Cloud computing offers you the great and awesome advantages of being able to instantly scale your application, replicate your data and basically just grow according to your business volume, and all this without significant investments, delivery time, setup time, people time, maintenance or anything bu…

>you're also paying Amazon's profits. Are you? Amazon is not known for posting profits, and is quite possibly operating AWS at a loss. They have promised to show financial results for AWS itself with the quarterly report being released next month, so we'll see.

AWS is hugely profitable:

https://gigaom.com/2013/01/07/amazons-cloud-is-bigger-more-p...

Re: How and Why Swiftype Moved from EC2 to Real Hardware

#86

Post by ori_b »

kovyrin wrote: post #66
snoopybbt wrote: post #43

There's not much need for a fancy article on a fancy website in order to understand a key concept of cloud computing: Cloud computing offers you the great and awesome advantages of being able to instantly scale your application, replicate your data and basically just grow according to your business volume, and all this without significant investments, delivery time, setup time, people time, maintenance or anything bu…

If only it were that simple... But every second relatively young engineer I interview points out that "But Netflix! Look how good the cloud works for them!" and once again I need to explain, that Netflix spends millions in engineering resources cost to handle EC2 issues and we are not (almost nobody is) Netflix (yet?).

Netflix also runs many of their own servers, and puts their own racks into many data centers.

https://openconnect.itp.netflix.com/hardware/index.html

https://openconnect.itp.netflix.com/peeringLocations/index.h...

Re: How and Why Swiftype Moved from EC2 to Real Hardware

#87

Post by lucas_alwin »

Here's my anecdotal, one-data-point experience from moving a giant EC2 environment to datacenter:

1. Your operational overhead will increase _a lot_. Be ready to hire on a lot of ops staff if you expect them to do anything but put out fires. And as you grow you'll need experts, people like network engineers.

2. Any weirdness you experienced with AWS infrastructure will be replaced with weirdness in your own environment, except now you're on the line to troubleshoot and fix it yourself.

3. Operation staff will immediately start guarding the food bowl as resources become finite. Server provision waits start to seem like breadlines. Power is consolidated with Those Whom You Must Ask.

4. Your cost will decrease, sometimes significantly so.

5. You'll have more hardware flexibility to run your app just the way you want to (Stack Overflow's mega databases come to mind[0]).

In the end I think this type of transition is for stable companies that don't mind or even prefer strong divisions of labor (coders who code, sysadmins who sysadmin, testers who test), but it's not for startups or companies that hope to move with any kind of strong velocity.

[0] http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/7/21/stackoverflow-upda...

Re: How and Why Swiftype Moved from EC2 to Real Hardware

#89

Post by chx »

lucas_alwin wrote: post #87

Here's my anecdotal, one-data-point experience from moving a giant EC2 environment to datacenter: 1. Your operational overhead will increase _a lot_. Be ready to hire on a lot of ops staff if you expect them to do anything but put out fires. And as you grow you'll need experts, people like network engineers. 2. Any weirdness you experienced with AWS infrastructure will be replaced with weirdness in your own environme…

> Your operational overhead will increase _a lot_. Be ready to hire on a lot of ops staff if you expect them to do anything but put out fires. And as you grow you'll need experts, people like network engineers.

Why? What are you talking about? You are hiring servers you are no colo'ing them. Networking them is not your problem. Your responsibility still starts from a root prompt just there's no VM layer between that and the physical server.

Re: How and Why Swiftype Moved from EC2 to Real Hardware

#90

Post by icedchai »

I'm convinced hybrid cloud is the way to go. Anything needing high IO performance should be on dedicated. Anything needed CPU/memory elasticity (worker nodes, etc) should be in the cloud. Assuming you can get low latency connectivity into AWS with DirectConnect, this might work?
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