I don't think this article is news. The editorialized title in HN is unfortunate and I wish a mod can change it. The article talks about the reasons Dropbox decided to move 500PB storage into our own data centers. Also like the article mentions, "They still use AWS for some workloads".
Yeah and that's why it amazes me that Netflix uses Amazon a straight competitor that uses the money it makes from Netflix to compete with Amazon prime.
Netflix probably in a better position to do the math than random people on HN. I think they have done their homework and decided that it is overall cheaper to keep ___some___ of their infra on AWS.
Yes! Thank you! Every time some piece like this is posted 'experts' arise here and know everything better. Like there is a bunch of idiots working at Netflix who are happily burning money...
I hear this line of thinking a lot but I don't really buy it.
You could just as easily say it's amazing that Amazon allows a competitor like Netflix to run on it's platform. The reality is that relationship is more complex than that.
Netflix is going to exist regardless of whether Amazon lets them run on AWS.
Amazon letting them run on AWS is brilliant as they get a piece of Netflix's pie. So even if Netflix beats Amazon Prime, Amazon gets to dip into their pot via revenues from AWS. It's a great hedging of bets.
They're totally separate businesses. The people that treat Netflix like their customer aren't the same people making strategic decisions about Amazon Prime. Amazon is a ridiculously large company.
Migrations and self hosted infrastructure don't do themselves. Netflix can get quite a lot of stuff done on AWS for the $200k+ dollars it would take to hire one single employee.
What's the largest cloud provider that does NOT offer a Netflix-like streaming video service? Amazon/AWS, Microsoft/Azure, and Google Cloud all have offer premium streaming content of some type. IBM Cloud?
My point was that Netflix uses AWS services exclusively instead of dividing it between multiple services at least though now days they probably get really deep discounts from Amazon to stay on AWS because of competition and it probably is lot cheaper for them then building and maintaining it's their own servers.
Netflix built their own CDN ages ago. Given that their core business logic is basically static content delivery whats left to AWS probably is a lot less than commenters in this thread seem to think.
AWS doesn't even let you do BGP. If you want to use them for a CDN, you're monopolized into their network and their blend of ridiculously overpriced bandwidth.
They might be using AWS for the canonical store of data, but the sanity of using "the cloud" goes out the window the second you need to ship a lot of traffic to the public internet.
While I don't know what pricing AWS has for high bandwidth customers since it's not public, I do know that the public prices are really high.
The thing is, even for smaller companies it's easy to get way better deals on bandwidth. I'm currently using a provider that runs openstack and I'm paying less than $0.009/GB, from the first byte(no commitment). I'd say that is very cheap compared to AWS pricing at $0.05/GB above 350 TB.
With colocation or renting dedicated servers and IP-transit you can get way lower prices. A dedicated 1 Gbps is about 300 USD/month with my provider, and the prices drops hard for dedicated 10, 40 and 100 Gbps uplinks.
Never used OVH myself, but they are providing 2 Gbps at £340/month for their highest quality bandwidth, and £64/month for bandwidth they think would be good for downloads.
I think using cloud providers for somewhat high bandwidth services are basically throwing money out the window. Until prices really drops(if they ever will) I'll continue thinking that clouds are for temporary workloads or prototyping with the ability to easily scale at a high cost.
Below $10k/mo bandwidth plays are irrelevant - the cost of the support infrastructure is just too high.
At $10k/mo what you do is plop a rack in one of the well connected buildings in NYC, VA, SF, SJC, CHI and get either flat rate 10Gs or 1G commits over 10Gs. You should be paying between 0.55 and 0.75 per Mbit/sec on 95th percentile on 1G commit. You put into the same cabinet your edge nodes that actually would be pushing the traffic out and use AWS or GCP for your compute workloads.
To be fair, Netflix only runs some of their infrastructure on AWS. Basically, if I understand correctly, their applications run on AWS and their delivery is through their own CDN built on top of various ISPs[1].
Correct, but some is probably an understatment. They are pretty much run everyting on AWS except what you cited (e.g video processing and content delivery). Netflix is the biggest AWS user.
> We rely on the cloud for all of our scalable computing and storage needs — our business logic, distributed databases and big data processing/analytics, recommendations, transcoding, and hundreds of other functions that make up the Netflix application. Video is delivered through Netflix Open Connect, our content delivery network that is distributed globally to efficiently deliver our bits to members’ devices.
They have a completely different use case that benefits from being able to scale up and down quickly. I don't see them moving away from AWS anytime soon.
Please, how fucking stupid. Of course they moved as much as possible off AWS, and only use AWS for new and experimental services. The markup of cloud servers is immoral, and the brainwashing that cloud services are a value at all is a testimony to how many people simply do not do the math.
I am not sure what you are talking about. They moved out the 500PB data storage because ______at that scale______ it is cheaper to run it on your own hardware. This implies few things like having engineers with skills that are really not easy to find for starting and a bunch of other challenges that you need to solve.
I don't think this article is news. The editorialized title in HN is unfortunate and I wish a mod can change it. The article talks about the reasons Dropbox decided to move 500PB storage into our own data centers. Also like the article mentions, "They still use AWS for some workloads".
Edit: Here is another HN submission of the same piece with the correct headline. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15257331