31–40 of 47 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Running your own data center is just a PITA no one wants to do. Non-C-levels just love to ignore the costs you have when doing such a thing by just comparing hardware costs to the cloud costs. There's always the liability aspect, managing less people, externalizing some complexity to another company etc. etc. All worth a lot of money, at least for me personally. I wanna focus on software, not also having to manage ha…
> Running your own data center is just a PITA I believe in the article they clearly say they just use colo, not running own DCs > I wanna focus on software, not also having to manage hardware lifecycles, fire stuff, more engineers etc. etc. You deal with enough complexity nowadays already. This looks strange to me, to focus on software but not on company goals, one of them quite often is to increase profits/decrease…
Granted, I'm never using edge/runner stuff and choosing the stack from the get go as something performant. I'm also talking about headcount In short: it's not the background (I'm not the one directly managing hardware anyway!), but the upside is not enough for the risk, costs and headaches in general. You need to have a real good use case to do CoLo/DC. If you build web software, you probably don't need it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Running your own data center is just a PITA no one wants to do. Non-C-levels just love to ignore the costs you have when doing such a thing by just comparing hardware costs to the cloud costs. There's always the liability aspect, managing less people, externalizing some complexity to another company etc. etc. All worth a lot of money, at least for me personally. I wanna focus on software, not also having to manage ha…
> I'd say that if you really want to have hardware on your own, you get the right people to do the job for you. CTOs are not managing that on the floor. So I'm not sure it's the real reason. Not sure I got this point right - if you need to create you own product you will need to hire programmers as well and get right people. Same for PMs, Security, Infra guys as I see it.
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> But their new VC-installed CTO was like… No! Largely the point I'm trying to put here > Their first month’s bill was $50,000. And it only went up from there. Well, I've read it's not uncommon to have salaries of 200-500k USD/year per programmer, on that scale may be it doesn't matter is it 50k spending on infra or 100k . For others such extra spending is _something_ though.
You're mixing yearly salary figures and monthly infra bills.
Nice writing! My gut feeling says part of the problem is C-levels, like CTOs, in recent time, coming solely from programming experience and its just mentally hard for them to even consider having physical hardware (yet on colocation!) and managing such systems. It's just out of equation. On the article itself, billions scale payments are astonishing. And how much paying for traffic would add here too.
Running your own data center is just a PITA no one wants to do. Non-C-levels just love to ignore the costs you have when doing such a thing by just comparing hardware costs to the cloud costs. There's always the liability aspect, managing less people, externalizing some complexity to another company etc. etc. All worth a lot of money, at least for me personally. I wanna focus on software, not also having to manage ha…
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Why does knowing the discount give you any additional leverage?
Knowing X get Y% discount would give you the opportunity to ask for the same Y% discount. Not just AWS, in enterprise world the service provider will always make the % discount a secret and you can’t tell anyone else.
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> Then "infra" would be under "IT" in such kind of setups? Depends what you mean by "infra". The team that would manage your DC (either self managed or CoLo) would generally be under the CFO or COO (who will generally report to CFO), and as such that team would fall into the Finance procurement bucket. Even if R&D has budget for multiple racks in your DC, it will still cost money on the Finance&IT side of the house t…
It’s an own goal, why not have infrastructure as a sibling team to the dev team. This is a problem only because I make it a problem, situation
Core IT (not Infra - Infra often means DevOps/Platform which is part of R&D), like any other shared function, is placed under the CFO/COO org because it is a shared internal function that's used to keep the lights on.
These are functions that by definition are a cost center, and as such R&D really doesn't want to own it, as it distracts from the core mission of delivering forward facing features.
The whole point of the DevOps/Platform Eng model was to incorporate operations under R&D, but having R&D own and manage physical assets is a major distraction, and a major reason Public Cloud became popular among plenty of companies.
Cost of compute isn't the only variable that comes to play - depreciation, hiring/firing, security, redundancy planning (because these are physical assets), etc are all significant headaches operationally and financially.
Technology is a tool - you choose the tool that works best. In some cases Public Cloud is the solution, in other cases it's a CoLo. It comes down to your specific organization's needs.
I think these articles are great. It's about understanding what you do and what infra is appropriate. I have to wonder how that would look with a negotiated AWS discount. But they might get beaten to death by incoming bandwidth costs anyway.
For a spend their size they should be able to get a much bigger discount.
It would probably behoove them to ask AWS about it, and to report back.
At some point AWS just wants their capacity to be utilized. Unused CPU and memory are like empty seats on the plane: you might as well fill them up because you're losing money on those empty seats when you take off.
Nice writing! My gut feeling says part of the problem is C-levels, like CTOs, in recent time, coming solely from programming experience and its just mentally hard for them to even consider having physical hardware (yet on colocation!) and managing such systems. It's just out of equation. On the article itself, billions scale payments are astonishing. And how much paying for traffic would add here too.
When you’re a growth stage company, the flexibility and leanness that comes from the cloud is important. Once your core product and computing demands stabilize, it’s a good time to figure out what makes sense to move to cheaper compute.
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> We don't know what are Netflix discounts What you do, if you're a VC backed SaaS company with a six or seven figure monthly spend on AWS, is hire away someone from Netflix who does know what their discount is and use that when your next contract negotiation is up with AWS.
Why does knowing the discount give you any additional leverage?
“I know this is possible because we had it at X” is a lot different conversation than “We want X”. Your leverage is even worse when X is nowhere near reality (in either direction).