[rich_sasha]

I'm still surprised thag large companies use AWS. I'd imagine if you're anywhere between medium/small/tiny, the tradeoffs are well worth it.

But AWS is not exactly cheap. Whenever I look at renting time on a meaty machine, it never compares favourably to buying one outright. And it can't really, Amazon is passing on the entire cost of ownership onto the clients, plus their mark up, and maybe even a little extra to cover for idle time (if that's a thing).

Wouldn't Zoom be better off with their own data centers and their own servers?

[chronid]

Building your own datacenter is hard (think the logistics for just keeping the lights on).

Even if you don't own/manage the building but simply buy the hardware (and spares, and DC ops) from HP/Dell/EMC and friends things can become suprisingly even harder, because it leads to a rabbit hole of and tons of badly implemented ticketing systems and badly baked processes you don't really complain, which open the path for the "stale IT" developers complain about. Offloading that further to more consulting companies leads to an even bigger mess of staleness and sluggish movement/execution, with incredible lead times to expand the capacity for services and getting it for new projects.

Unless you have very good processes (I've never seen a company with those), iron clad contracts (your CTO chose the consulting company because he is playing golf in the weekend with the consulting company CEO. Oh sorry you don't even have a CTO, that was your CEO instead) and plenty (relative to company size) of good people in the right positions to drive things (no, you won't have those) managing your datacenter is massively harder compared to just using the cloud.

Then there are the benefit in financial sense (capex vs opex, opex always wins).

[rich_sasha]

Well, I certainly couldn't build a data centre.

But i worked for a small/medium company that built two. Complete with data replication across datacentres, fancy fire suppression, redundant communications between them etc. The works. Oh and redundant power supply on both sites, battery and generator.

Admittedly this was before the cloud took off, or around the cusp of it. But we then did a calculation to compare the costs. I wasn't involved, but the result was that even factoring in the cost of the hardware, data centers and extra staff (if any; configuring AWS seems a profession in it's own right) it was still cheaper over 3-5 years to DIY.

We used a lot of computer, but so does Zoom I'd imagine.

[theshrike79]

There is millions of hours of engineering work in all of the services on AWS.

If you intend to replace it with either self-built or open source tools, you're gonna need a good two dozen people on it full time. Plus 24/7/365 admins to keep it running.

Or you can just take the cost and export the work to Amazon, which is usually a lot easier and cheaper in the long run.

[sporkland]

I feel like just build/rum on your own hardware is the "I could build it in a weekend". It takes so much effort and you end up with a worse platform over time.