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by Johnny555 2913 days ago
It's been a few years since doing the cost benefit analysis between AWS and self-hosting, but for around 50 racks worth of servers and storage, the numbers came in on AWS's side.

That didn't even take into account the "free" multi-region capability you get from Amazon. Splitting our physical servers into a second region with enough capacity to failover would have nearly doubled our costs.
3 comments
hueving 2913 days ago
Were those numbers using 50 racks worth of instances (e.g. 20,000 of them) for the comparison? Did you remember to take into account the obscene bandwidth rates (sorry if that seems like a dumb question but I've seen this bite multiple companies moving to AWS)?

The break evens happen a lot earlier in my experience for static workloads, but I would love to see a breakdown if you're willing to share details.

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jjeaff 2913 days ago
Why would you compare AWS vs managing your own data center?

You could also compare AWS vs building your own silicon.

I think it would be better to compare AWS vs renting dedicated servers from a large provider? I think you will find that the scales tip heavily in favor of renting bare metal as far as price is concerned.

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Johnny555 2913 days ago
Why would you compare AWS vs managing your own data center?

Because we were already managing our own data center.

I think it would be better to compare AWS vs renting dedicated servers from a large provider? I think you will find that the scales tip heavily in favor of renting bare metal as far as price is concerned.

We offloaded a lot of work to Amazon that we were doing ourselves -- database hosting, storage system management, etc (lots of little used data went into S3/Glacier that previously we had on live disks)

Also, we liked the ability to have a failover region essentially for free - we only pay for enough servers to replicate the key data we need for failover, and keep the rest of the infrastructure powered off.

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mmt 2913 days ago
> storage system management

I was a bit incredulous that any truly all-inclusive analysis could ever show AWS being cheaper, but this phrasing made me realize that it could have been the one (remarkably common) case where it usually does: enterprise hardware.

That world is easily more expensive than AWS, especially considering that hardware maintenance contracts are a thing (and a shockingly expensive one, to those of us accustomed to the commodity hardware world).

> Also, we liked the ability to have a failover region essentially for free - we only pay for enough servers to replicate the key data we need for failover, and keep the rest of the infrastructure powered off.

That's a useful advantage, though there's a pitfall in that there's no powering off EBS volumes.

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dominias 2913 days ago
You may be managing your own datacenter but you sure won’t be building any new ones.
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apple4ever 2913 days ago
I think that would make sense. For us, that need a single rack, it comes out heavily on the data center size. AWS was twice as expensive.
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