| I worked at Amazon from 2001 to 2006 (and I'm older than you are by a decade). I made an $8M mistake in 2006 selling all my AMZN stock options because I figured that AWS would never go anywhere because the costs were ridiculous and self-hosting should always be cheaper. The only thing that Amazon did was do everything cheap as fuck. They didn't use fiberchannel or SANs and didn't pay EMC or VMWare a dime. The engineers and managers that gave of a whiff of trying to empire-build were generally fired. Doing things cheaply and simply is magic is that the industry does not seem to understand. And now what Amazon has built on top of its own simple infrastructure is grossly complicated, which makes people feel like its impossible to compete with them since they'd need to build something grossly complicated as well. It should be simple to run your own in-house "cloud" by doing things very simple and cheap and scalable and responsive to the business. Just have a CTO with a vision and the willingness to aggressively fire the fuck out of anyone spending too much money or putting up barriers to getting shit done (ITIL). Apparently doing this is more difficult than quantum gravity though. So everyone uses AWS. Don't get me started on containers and Kubernetes... |