

Bechtolsheim: AWS, open source rewrite rules for startups - mrmaddog
http://gigaom.com/2011/11/10/arista-roadmap-2011/

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asharp
It's interesting that Netflix mentions the cost of infrustructure.

At the moment, owning dedicated servers and coloing them yourself is orders of
magnitude cheaper then a cloud provider. It's only "cheaper" if your cost of
money is stupidly high, ie. you're a startup, or other factors dominate your
TCO, ie. you're a startup.

What is interesting is that supply side there is no reason for this to be so.
Furthermore there are reasons to expect that the equilibrium price for cloud
to be below the cost of dedicated hardware/colocation.

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ChuckMcM
This is spot on. At some point I expect these costs to flip. I've done the TCO
computation a couple of ways and for OCP/Web2 type deployments its still
cheaper to do your own deployment once you need more than 500 instances.

Of course not to take away from Andy's point, if you're deploying the
equivalent of Slashdot (which ran on like a dozen servers) then you're silly
to spend a couple employee slots on keeping that running in a co-hosted
scenario. And these days, given the power of a machine, a LOT of things can be
done on a relatively small handful of machines.

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asharp
The point will probably be a few years off, at least for retail prices.
Cloudsmithing is still a new art, and there are very few people outside of
Amazon who can produce a functional cloud.

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crb
Hint: The title makes much more sense when you realise that they mean 'rewrite
the rules' as a verb, not 'rewrite rules' as in mod_rewrite.

~~~
leeoniya
wuz confused for way too long, also.

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jroseattle
> The combination of low-cost data center infrastructure and rapidly evolving,
> free or nearly free open-source development tools means that tech startups
> can get going cheap, and if things don’t work out, move on to other things,
> Bechtolsheim said today at the GigaOM RoadMap Conference.

How is this news? Anyone in the startup space already knows about AWS and
open-source.

Thanks, Andy Bechtolsheim, for confirming what many of us have already known
for a long time.

