| >Before AWS it took thousands of people and billions in capital investment to do so. WhatsApp Stats (2014): - 450 million active users, and reached that number faster than any other company in history. - 50 billion messages every day across seven platforms (inbound + outbound) - 32 engineers, one developer supports 14 million active users - $60 million investment from Sequoia Capital Which they managed their own FreeBSD servers hosted on SoftLayer. [1] http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/2/26/the-whatsapp-archi... YouTube (2008): "YouTube grew incredibly fast, to over 100 million video views per day, with only a handful of people responsible for scaling the site" - 2 sysadmins, 2 scalability software architects - 2 feature developers, 2 network engineers, 1 DBA "They went to a colocation arrangement. Now they can customize everything and negotiate their own contracts." "Sequoia invested a total of $11.5 million in two separate rounds and was the only venture firm to invest in the company." [3] [2] http://highscalability.com/youtube-architecture [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/09/business/09cnd-deal.html |
There is a sweet spot where cloud is good and provides some benefit but, once you're serving hundreds of millions of people and have double-digit millions in investment, you can probably do significantly better cost-wise rolling your own servers. Worst case, you just throw your own hypervisor management system on them and have most of the same features you got from a cloud service. If you're smart, you can probably architect it so you have on-demand overflow capacity from a cloud provider in case there's a spike you can't account for, which is the best of both worlds.