

Animoto: The No-Infrastructure Startup  - geirfreysson
http://www.fastcompany.com/welcome.html?destination=http://www.fastcompany.com/articles/2008/09/interview-animoto.html?page=0%252C0

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Maven
Why do I have a feeling that they did absolutely no programming at all...

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oldgregg
anybody know what kind of software platform they are using? did they build
everything from the ground up?

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swombat
Doesn't everyone do that nowadays? Why would you own hardware in this day and
age?

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olefoo
1\. hardware you own is in a separate legal category, and it's somewhat harder
for j. random people to subpoena the contents of hard drives you own as
opposed to ones you rent.

2\. It's harder to exercise due diligence and appropriate care on machines
whose very existence is hypothetical to you.

3\. you can do things with hardware that are difficult if not impossible to do
on commodity VPSen. Like dropping a couple of Cavium cards into a machine
that's going to be doing high-volume row level cryptography in a transactional
db. Tuning disk arrays for maximal performance, etc.

4\. Audit controls are easier to implement if you control the datacenter.

All that said; if you aren't dealing with sensitive data and don't have any
potential dependencies on special hardware, and are willing to live with the
fact that anything you do out in the cloud is potentially visible to outside
scrutiny and interference; go for it.

