[toomuchtodo]

Cue the cloud apologists that “it’s better to use the cloud than to build and manage your own infra”.

This is why you build and run your own storage, similar to Backblaze (who is almost entirely bootstrapped except for one reasonable round of investment).

[ben509]

To cloud or not to cloud is the same as any outsourcing decision.

For many operations, you may get to a point where it makes sense to build your own cloud.

If you're a seller, you might also get to a point where you want to sell goods directly.

It partly depends on your core expertise, meaning, is this part of how your business creates value? If NASA doesn't want be a datacenter provider, they should continue to outsource it.

It also depends on whether their business model aligns with yours. AWS's egress rules specifically work when you are getting revenue from the data being downloaded. If you're selling software or other media, and you can factor the cost of downloads into the price of it, pay-for-egress is very sustainable.

Other models like pay-for-capacity don't align as well if you want to maintain a large library of media and people are attracted by the variety, but only download the popular stuff.

For NASA, pay-for-egress may be entirely justified if their budget is based on usage of the data. Or if they can simply use "requester pays" to mitigate the cost.

[Karunamon]

Cue the cloud detractors that "a failure to do due diligence (in this case: 15 minutes on the pricing calculator) on your computing platform should be held against the whole platform".

Snark aside, it entirely depends on what you're doing. AWS probably has better engineers, better processes, and more of them than your company.

[toomuchtodo]

Due diligence only somewhat mitigates the damage done by having a generation of engineers who believe going straight to AWS or another expensive cloud provider is the first and or best course of action, when you have engineers scoff at building a cheaper, more efficient solution better fit for purpose. Backblaze proves it can be done, and I argue they are just as competent, if not more, than Amazon. They’ve provided a similar object storage system as S3 at a drastically lower cost.

In most scenarios, it’s not my money, and I don’t care if it’s not my money. In this case, as a taxpayer, it’s my money (our money to be specific) and I care. I intend to contact my representatives about this failure, and have already fired off a FOIA request for AWS NASA contract details.

[falcolas]

None of which will really help you, since AWS priority is AWS, not the uptime of your business. And no number of those better engineers or processes have prevented downtime and service interruptions on AWS.

[unethical_ban]

Oh, man.

Better run your own Internet, after all, you care more about connectivity to your friends than your ISP does!

Dogmatism is passé. There are good uses for cloud, and good times for on-premise, depending on what you need, what your skillsets are as an organization, the kinds of workloads and length of time required for that workload.

AWS and others have absolutely outstanding amounts of infrastructure and tooling. Their reliability is off the charts in the past few years, and (once it actually gets figured out by your engineers) the cloud concept of IAM is incredibly secure.

There are pitfalls - cost, up-front complexity and several other things - but I no longer rag on "the cloud".

[toomuchtodo]

Amazon has outages all the time, hidden on their status board with a green triangle, and you still lose S3 objects once you’re operating at a large enough scale.

A quick google search for “amazon outages” lists the numerous extended outages they’ve experienced.

[Karunamon]

How many of those outages were multi-region and would have taken down a properly distributed application? How many outages and instances of lost data would the average enterprise, likely without their own datacenters, redundant power, hardware staff, etc have taken in the same period?

[toomuchtodo]

Most applications will never be architected to be “properly distributed” because of cost. Many popular web properties (Reddit) still have outages on AWS even when architected properly. Netflix still distributes content from their own CDN with their OpenConnect appliances, and only uses AWS for non streaming use cases (jedberg will correct me on both Netflix and Reddit points if I'm missing something and comes across this comment).

https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2017/02/28/amazons-...

If my app is architected for reliability, I’ll run it on bare metal and keep the costs savings. Why pay twice by building it for cloud durability and running it on expensive cloud resources? Clearly the AWS marketing is working (“you’re just building it wrong”).

We’ll see what happens when CFOs take the reins from CTOs and CIOs and start putting cost controls in place during this recession (“why exactly are we paying so much in opex when this could be capex we can depreciate?”).

[pas]

I thought the ultimate argument was that if you're big enough AWS will make you a deal. But maybe now AWS is just so big and already growing so fast, they don't want to make exceptions and lower their profitability.

[belval]

They got a 50% deal. From the article:

"At least NASA seems to have bagged a good deal from AWS: The Register used Amazon’s cloudy cost calculator to tot up the cost of storing 247PB in the cloud giant’s S3 service. The promised pay-as-you-go price for us on the street was a staggering $5,439,526.92 per month, not taking into account the free tier discount of 12 cents. The audit, meanwhile, suggests an increased cloud spend of around $30m a year by 2025, on top of NASA’s $65m-per-year deal with AWS."

[jleahy]

$5.4m/mo * 12 mo/yr = $65m/yr. My guess is the "$65m/year deal with AWS" is actually the S3 cost and the extra $30m/year of 'increased cloud spend' is the egress costs found by the audit. Otherwise it's a coincidence of the numbers.