[developer2]

As someone who is apparently all-in on AWS, can you explain how you justify the cost? I understand the convenience of having all the pre-built services, but that is a finitely limited benefit. The vendor lock-in of the entire infrastructure and deployment processes being extremely AWS-specific means it's financially infeasible to migrate elsewhere once you are launched. Tack on the expensive-beyond-belief S3 server pricing that gets you terrible allocations of shared hardware, the sky-high insane prices they charge for bandwidth, and the penny-and-nickeling of all other services. I continue to be baffled that any small, medium, or large company believes AWS serves them better than any dedicated or colocation alternative.

The vast, vast, vast majority (seriously, probably 95-98%) of companies do not build out the required AWS infrastructure to remain highly available, with failover, with on-demand auto-scaling of all services that would make AWS the go-to choice. I continue to come across the individuals who maintain the fantasy that their business will remain online if a nuclear bomb wipes out their primary data centre. Yet they all deploy to a single availability zone, the same way you'd deploy a cluster of servers anywhere else. I cease to be amazed at businesses that spend $10k+ a month on AWS that would cost them half that with a colocated deployment.

[trjordan]

Here's some cases that I've handled with AWS that justifies the cost:

- About a month ago, our database filled up, both in space and IOPS required. We do sizeable operations every day, and jobs were stacking up. I clicked a couple buttons and upgraded our RDS instance in-place, with no downtime.

- We were going through a security audit. We spun up an identical clone of production and ran the audit against that, so we didn't disrupt normal operations if anything crashy was found.

- Our nightly processing scaled poorly on a single box, and we turned on a bunch of new customers to find that our nightly jobs now took 30 hours. We were in the middle of a feature crunch and had no time to re-write any of the logic. We spun up a bunch of new instances with cron jobs and migrated everything that day.

100% worth it for a small business that's focused on features. Every minute I don't mess with servers is a minute I can talk to customers.

[otterley]

We're paying an agility premium, that's why. My company has both colocated and AWS assets, and while we save a bunch of money with the colocated assets over their AWS equivalents, we would much rather work with the AWS assets.

We don't have to bother ourselves with managing SANs, managing bare metal, managing hardware component failures and FRUs, managing PDUs, managing DHCP and PXE boot, managing load balancers, managing networks and VLANs, and managing hypervisors and VMs. We don't have to set up NFS or object stores.

Being on a mature managed service platform like AWS means that if we want 10 or 100 VMs, I can ask for them and get them in minutes. If I want to switch to beefier hardware, I can do so in minutes. If I want a new subnet in a different region, I can have one in minutes. There's simply no way I can have that kind of agility running my own datacenters.

Nobody disputes that AWS is expensive. But we're not paying for hardware or bandwidth qua hardware or bandwidth - we're paying for value added.

[developer2]

Curious, would you say this an indication that there are not enough talented/competent sysadmin/infrastructure people to employ to manage those tasks in-house? Or is it your opinion that AWS provides so much value that in-house simply can't compete in terms of the man-hours it would require to manage the equivalent? The whole "spin up in minutes" is certainly not unique to AWS; most hosting providers, especially if you are a sizeable business, is going to be at your beck and call whenever you need them.

I still think the benefits of AWS are over-emphasized within most businesses. Of the 4 companies I've worked for that used AWS, 3 of them did absolutely nothing different than you'd do anywhere else. One-time setup of a static number of servers, with none of the scaling/redundancy/failure scenarios accounted for. The 4th company tried to make use of AWS's unique possibilities, but honestly we had more downtime due to poorly arranged "magical automation" than I've ever seen with in-house. I suppose it requires a combination of the AWS stack's offerings and knowledgeable sysadmins who have experience with its unique complexities.

Disclaimer: I'm a developer rather than a sysadmin, not trying to justify my own existence. :p

[encoderer]

We have finite time to improve a product. Any minutes spent racking servers (physically or otherwise) are minutes spent not working on something that adds value for our users. Driving the top line is more important than optimizing expenses that are relatively small.

We started Cronitor as a side business and we've grown by seeking out the highest leverage usage of our time. My cofounder wrote a blog post about this https://blog.cronitor.io/the-jit-startup-bb1a13381b0#.kwbpma...