> As mentioned, Etsy and others have gone against the cloud tide and seem to be making it work. Etsy CTO Kellan Elliott-McCrea told me that the online marketplace has discovered "very real cost savings" and higher utilization by running in its own data centers.
Even your own article contradicts your claim. :P
Yes, for people who can't capacity plan effectively...paying someone else to have idle capacity makes sense. For the rest of the world, it doesn't.
Most of the world doesn't need hundreds or thousands of servers... most businesses need fewer than fifty or a hundred. And growing is pretty easy... Once you hit a certain scale it absolutely makes sense to consider migrating, but that's the point where you have teams of dedicated employees.
And even then the costs of moving off of the cloud solution may never be worth it.
Umm. Look, I really don't think you know what you are talking about and you seem really eager to defend your whole "USE AWS BECAUSE ITS SO EASY" mantra as you replied to every almost all of the posts I made in this thread.
So I'm going to distill this into one post:
> Most of the world doesn't need hundreds or thousands of servers... most businesses need fewer than fifty or a hundred. And growing is pretty easy... Once you hit a certain scale it absolutely makes sense to consider migrating, but that's the point where you have teams of dedicated employees.
Fewer nodes actually means the cloud makes less sense not more...often you can get away with 10 1Us in different DCs. At that scale, "the cloud" makes even less sense than you think it does. Leasing dedicated servers is cheap compared to the cost of automated deployments of 50 VMs, especially in labor costs. At which point, we are just talking Active/Passive deployments across 2 datacenters and such.
Amazon really, at this scale, isn't giving you anything you can't do for yourself. The only time AWS seems to make sense is as a 1-2 man shop where you literally don't have enough time in the day or at extremely volatile loads where you can't capacity plan. Most businesses are neither of those.
> And even then the costs of moving off of the cloud solution may never be worth it.
Yes, that is called vendor lock in and that is what AWS, etc. rely on. If you don't develop the in-house talent, you can never move off without problems. Waking up one day and going "LOL I WANTS TO MOVE" is a bad idea.
> Really? could you elaborate on these other providers? I would expect at least, VPS, remote files (S3/Azure-Blob), distributed key-value store as a service, some SQL variant as a service, and load balancing as a service. Most of the alternatives I've seen don't offer those services, and most only do VPS.
Honestly, if you can't figure this out on your own without relying on AWS at the scale of 3 people...you have no business discussing this, frankly. This is a case of the blind assuming everyone else is.
I have hobbies with 99.5% uptime that essentially have all of those functions serviced for cheaper than AWS.
> Linode, and most alternatives, don't have S3/Blob storage as a service.. also missing are distributed key-value storage as a service and sql as a service.
...this is one of those times where I'm tempted to just run a site that includes all these things as a hobby just to point out how stupid this comment is. I don't really need more hobbies but this YC fanboy behavior is ridiculous. Well, except for the "kv/sql as a service" because that is just silly and can be done just fine with traditional clusters that have existed for years.
> Generally, with any given service as you can scale it makes sense to run your own instances.. but realistically someone who knows insert-tech better than AWS/Azure admins is a pretty rare breed, and having to in-source those specific skills costs in terms of time and money, redundancy even more so.
> If you have a team of 3-5 people, you can do far more with AWS or Azure than you can most alternatives... Employees aren't free.
It seems rare to you 'cause it isn't something you are good at. AWS/Azure simply aren't cost effective. Fully loaded sysadmins cost for someone compentent is like $30/hr. Setting up an internal cluster for any of those things is much, much cheaper than AWS is after a year for literally every business I've ever dealt with IRL.
If I'm running all my own services... now I need to Hire people to manage my OSes for the app, as well as systems for databases, key-value stores, backup, mail, load balancing, etc, etc... few people are good at more than one or two of those things, which means I'd have to hire 2-3 people to cover those skills. 2-3 people at even 100k ($30/hr + employer taxes, etc), is quite a bit expensive than AWS services extra costs. Those are people you wouldn't necessarily need if you leveraged those services from AWS.
And when you say, you can just hire people to setup, and run maintenance via contracted services... I've tried hiring a PT postgresql dba, and it was pretty much impossible to do... those services I did reach out to mostly just plain didn't respond, even with a quote.
> as well as systems for databases, key-value stores, backup, mail, load balancing, etc, etc... few people are good at more than one or two of those things, which means I'd have to hire 2-3 people to cover those skills
That just isn't true. If those people were such unicorns, everyone would beg to hire me because I'm worth 2-3 people. :/ I'd be able to get a job anywhere with no trouble.
Given that isn't the case and most people find me unimpressive...yeah. I just think the problem is you, honestly.
Even your own article contradicts your claim. :P
Yes, for people who can't capacity plan effectively...paying someone else to have idle capacity makes sense. For the rest of the world, it doesn't.