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by amorphid
3402 days ago
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I don't know that I'd say Netflix is completely at the mercy of Amazon. Sure, if AWS goes down, Netflix goes down. But that would be true enough for they ran all of their own stuff, too... "Netflix is completely at the mercy of their ops team". One of the big points of the cloud is that is gives one the ability to do things that one would trouble doing without the cloud. A small business with a single part-time developer can deploy an app to Heroku, and not need an ops person. That sure beats the heck out of the small business not being able to deploy software at all. As a former small biz owner, I did not want to have to manage a bare metal server in a colocation rack with a not-cheap data pipe. I just wanted a CRUD app with a minimal feature set. When Heroku went down, I sat around wishing it would come back up, and eventually it did. That was way better than having to service a physical box when it failed. Heroku cost me a few hundred a month, and freed me up to earn much more than that. In my eyes, it paid for itself many times over. |
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They employ their ops team and their ops team has equity stake in the company's success as well as their career riding on the line.
If a chunk of Amazon goes down and takes out your website, all you can do is wait and hope Amazon is prioritizing the fix.
>When Heroku went down, I sat around wishing it would come back up, and eventually it did.
This method of recovery just doesn't cut it in businesses with lots of transactions 24/7. Just sitting around can be flushing thousands per minute down the drain. In those deployments, you need to build across multiple cloud providers; and once you've reached that abstraction, you might as well have your own hardware as well and just burst to providers.
A company like Netflix can get by because they have their own hardware for streaming so an outage only affects people browsing for a movie at the time. And on top of that, their only interactive transaction is signing up for the service, which is extremely infrequent compared to the rest of the traffic. So essentially it's safe for Netflix to use AWS because they don't need high reliability/control of their own destiny.
>A small business with a single part-time developer can deploy an app to Heroku, and not need an ops person.
This use case I understand. However, anything at the scale that is frequently discussed in these contexts (gitlab, etc), they need ops people.