
The Amazon AWS Premium - fanf2
http://calpaterson.com/amazon-premium.html
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rxm
Until the early 2010s we ran our own tiny data center (six to eight racks in
two separate locations). When we re-evaluated whether to have the racks hosted
somewhere else, it worked out way cheaper to run the machines ourselves. But
when we included the costs of the sporadic stuff, cloud providers became
cheaper.

The sporadic stuff adds up. This is the "other stuff" one needs to do to keep
the machines running. It includes the time it took someone to swap a failing
drive, or the loss of productivity when the system went down (because of
faulty air conditioning maintenance procedure), or the costs of procuring
hardware, or dealing with the network provider, and so on. This stuff adds up.
We ran a tight ship. Every minute someone spent dealing with the racks of
computers was a minute they did not spend creating a product for our
customers.

The only thing we had some difficulty with was intermediate reliability
storage, at the level of non-raided spinning disks. But that was then, when
the offerings where thinner.

