

Big Just Got Bigger - 5 Terabyte Object Support in Amazon S3 - werner
http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2010/12/amazon_s3_5_terabyte_objects.html

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zacman85
It is hard for me to even imagine what the world was like before Amazon Web
Services, despite having only used them for half of a year. I truly hope
Amazon is making ungodly sums of money with this increasingly powerful
platform. Why Google is laser-focused on social and local, yet letting Amazon
eat their lunch in this space is beyond me. I know Google has AppEngine and
Storage, but they seem to be lacking the full-featured, cohesive collection of
cloud services that Amazon has so clearly invested themselves in. I truly
wonder if we will wake up five years from now and the vast majority of the web
will be running on Amazon infrastructure.

~~~
ssmoot
No. It's _much_ more cost effective to run your own infrastructure.

It's always struck me as irresponsible for reedit to spend the sums they do
for example. You could easily spend half that and get four times the hardware
(in addition to an admin to manage it).

Some businesses just don't want to deal with it period. I get that. But at
some point it's almost irresponsible. Like sending an employee to starbucks
for everyone in the office a few times a day because you don't want the hassle
of setting up with a coffee service. ;-)

~~~
ghshephard
If it really was more cost effective to run your own infrastructure, then I
wonder why Netflix is going out of their way to migrate all of their
infrastructure to Level3 and AWS. They're even discussing the details at the
last cloud computing meetup:
<http://www.meetup.com/cloudcomputing/calendar/14476942/>

[Edit: Slides for Adrian's Talk on Netflix->AWS Here:
[http://www.slideshare.net/adrianco/netflix-on-cloud-
combined...](http://www.slideshare.net/adrianco/netflix-on-cloud-combined-
slides-for-dev-and-ops)

Video of his talk here:<http://blip.tv/file/4252897> ]

Unless you are ruthlessly disciplined (Craigslist), it rarely makes sense to
roll out your own infrastructure. When you start to sustain IT Systems in a
corporation, the real costs are not only what's visible, but also the cost of
managing, hiring, budgeting, change control, procurement, etc...

Plus - you get to ride on all the scale discounts of your cloud hosting
company. And, huge win - you don't have to chose the "Safe" technology
solutions (Cisco + HP + EMC, or Juniper + Dell + Hitachi) - but you can let
your cloud hosting company go spend a fortune on vetting an inexpensive,
innovative, but unproven technology, and then ride on their investment in that
vetting process.

~~~
physcab
I disagree. Amazon's cloud is great for getting started, no doubt about that.
And yes, they take care of all the administration. But the hardware and
bandwidth costs are absurdly expensive. Probably somewhere between 2x - 10x as
much. Netflix is outsourcing it because they are rich and can afford the
scalability that Amazon offers.

~~~
ghshephard
The mantra at every large company I've ever been at once we get past the
initial "Get it done" phase, is, "Do it cheaper, cheaper, cheaper."

I think the thing that everyone overlooks when they price AWS out is they are
looking at the cost of the bare metal. They aren't pricing their Network
Engineers, their DBAs, their Storage SysAdmin, Their Data Center Ops Manager,
the finance overhead required to buy/track all this gear.

Forget about the fact that no company over 200 employees I've ever been
involved in could add 30-40 servers in less than 30 days.

The reasons to not go to AWS have to do with things like control, security,
customization. Cost is the #2 reason everyone I've talked to is looking at
moving their infrastructure over to AWS. (Ability to quickly scale is usually
#1)

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madmath
"But I just want to serve 5 Terabytes!"

I like that they increased the limit, not 5x, not 100x, but 1000x. It clearly
sends the message that they are the leaders in cloud storage.

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kennymeyers
I can't believe this hasn't received more comments. I find this absolutely
astonishing and promising. The future is mighty bright.

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Yeroc
How long before the AWS division is spun off as it's own independent company?

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cperciva
Technically AWS _is_ a separate company: Amazon Web Services LLC. Presumably
Amazon.com is the only shareholder, though.

I doubt AWS will go public, though -- it's too central to Amazon's existence.
Amazon has never really been about books.

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riobard
I guess we have to thank Netflix for this? :D

~~~
polynomial
Netflix Cloud Architect Adrian Cockcroft explains:
<http://blip.tv/file/4252897>

slides here: [http://www.slideshare.net/adrianco/netflix-on-cloud-
combined...](http://www.slideshare.net/adrianco/netflix-on-cloud-combined-
slides-for-dev-and-ops)

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dotcoma
great. unless it's Wikileaks documents...

