| >This is terrible advice for all but the largest of organizations. Don't start a conversation with an opening generalization like that if you want something constructive. Especially when the rest of your post is clearly based on the single anecdote of your experience. >Running your own hardware is AWFUL. Maybe for you. Not for any sysadmin with even just a couple of years of experience. >patching operating systems We're talking about instances, none of that sysadmin stuff goes away if you're on AWS. If you don't have patching management for operating systems on AWS then your instances are screwed. AWS instances don't eliminate the need for sysadmin work. The only real difference is the hardware management. And if you read my post you would have seen that I said using aws for the on-demand flexibility is okay. All of the static workloads are what belongs down in your datacenter. Netflix doesn't run 1/3 of the Internet traffic off of AWS, only a tiny subset because of the aforementioned shitty economics. The real workhorses are in custom netflix servers at peering points. Netflix would be bankrupt if they used AWS for video. Do some research before spreading free marketing propaganda. This forum tends to only think in terms of explosive growth of traffic, which <0.1% of companies actually have to deal with. AWS flexibility is needed by very few successful B2C companies, but it's supported by the cargo-culting of orders of magnitude more developers ("jedberg said this worked for reddit, we need this because we're like reddit"). Also, your whole argument about non 'value-add' is bogus. That's the same excuse that management uses to outsource all development. Everything has a cost and provides some value to the company. |
You are doing as much, if not more generalization by way of the assumptions you're making.
> >Running your own hardware is AWFUL. > Maybe for you. Not for any sysadmin with even just a couple of years of experience.
Sysadmins aren't real estate attorneys or facilities managers or security personnel. A lot of them aren't even tech ops who physically manage the DC hardware and are oncall 24/7 to fix problems on-site if needed. You need all of those things to run your own DC, and potentially a lot more if you're physically building the center itself (architects, contractors, civil engineers, etc.). And if you're serious about latency, availability, and durability, you're going to need those things in multiples for however many datacenters are needed to meet your targets. How many organizations have the millions of dollars of capex needed to get that off the ground and keep it all running?
> Netflix doesn't run 1/3 of the Internet traffic off of AWS, only a tiny subset because of the aforementioned shitty economics.
To how many organizations do the economics of serving 1/3 of Internet traffic apply? 2? How is that a counterexample to his point about datacenters only making sense for the very largest?
Even if you sidestep all those costs by renting instead of building and even if we take for granted that your "shitty economics" are still shitty down numerous orders of magnitude from Netflix-size, you're still burning money making your devs design and operate your system twice - once for the DC, once for AWS, and however much work it is to glue the 2 together. The end result may be cheaper infrastructure-wise but it will also be unavoidably less reliable and more complex purely by virtue of having more than twice as many moving parts.
Let's say implementing things this way takes a single dev time-and-a-half compared to just doing it on one or the other. Let's say (very conservatively) you pay your dev $100k a year + $50k benefits. You're now $75k in the hole from the get-go. That's enough to pay for roughly 83 m5.large EC2 instances on-demand (no RI) for a year. Your company has to be very large for the marginal savings of using a DC to outweigh that kind of deficit.