[geocar]

Who are you thinking of?

Netflix might be spending as much as $120m (but probably a little less), and I thought they were probably Amazon's biggest customer. Does someone (single-buyer) spend more than that with AWS?

Hertzner's revenue is somewhere around $400m, so probably a little scary taking on an additional 30% revenue from a single customer, and Netflix's shareholders would probably be worried about risk relying on a vendor that is much smaller than them.

Sometimes if the companies are friendly to the idea, they could form a joint venture or maybe Netflix could just acquire Hertzner (and compete with Amazon?), but I think it unlikely Hertzner could take on Netflix-sized for nontechnical reasons.

However increasing pop capacity by 30% within 6mo is pretty realistic, so I think they'd probably be able to physically service Netflix without changing too much if management could get comfortable with the idea

[phiresky]

A $120M spend on AWS is equivalent to around a $12M spend on Hetzner Dedicated (likely even less, the factor is 10-20x in my experience), so that would be 3% of their revenue from a single customer.

[geocar]

> A $120M spend on AWS is equivalent to around a $12M spend on Hetzner Dedicated (likely even less, the factor is 10-20x in my experience), so that would be 3% of their revenue from a single customer.

I'm not convinced.

I assume someone at Netflix has thought about this, because if that were true and as simple as you say, Netflix would simply just buy Hetzner.

I think there lots of reasons you could have this experience, and it still wouldn't be Netflix's experience.

For one, big applications tend to get discounts. A decade ago when I (the company I was working for) was paying Amazon a mere $0,2M a month and getting much better prices from my account manager than were posted on the website.

There are other reasons (mostly from my own experiences pricing/costing big applications, but also due to some exotic/unusual Amazon features I'm sure Netflix depends on) but this is probably big enough: Volume gets discounts, and at Netflix-size I would expect spectacular discounts.

I do not think we can estimate the factor better than 1.5-2x without a really good example/case-study of a company someplace in-between: How big are the companies you're thinking about? If they're not spending at least $5m a month I doubt the figures would be indicative of the kind of savings Netflix could expect.

[varsketiz]

We run our own infrastructure, sometimes with our own fincing (4), sometimes external (3). The cost is in tens of millions per year.

When I used to compare to aws, only egress at list price costs as much as my whole infra hosting. All of it.

I would be very interested to understand why netflix does not go 3/4 route. I would speculate that they get more return from putting money in optimising costs for creating original content, rather than cloud bill.

[geocar]

> I would be very interested to understand why netflix does not go 3/4 route. I would speculate that they get more return from putting money in optimising costs for creating original content, rather than cloud bill.

I invest in Netflix, which means I'm giving them some fast cash to grow that business.

I'm not giving them cash so that they can have cash.

If they share a business plan that involves them having cash to do X, I wonder why they aren't just taking my cash to do X.

They know this. That's why on the investors calls they don't talk about "optimising costs" unless they're in trouble.

I understand self-hosting and self-building saves money in the long-long term, and so I do this in my own business, but I'm also not a public company constantly raising money.

> When I used to compare to aws, only egress at list price costs as much as my whole infra hosting. All of it.

I'm a mere 0,1% of your spend, and I get discounts.

You would not be paying "list price".

Netflix definitely would not be.

[varsketiz]

Of course netflix is optimising costs, otherwise it would not be a business, I just think they put much more effort elsewhere. They could be using other words, like "financial discipline" :)

My point is that even if I get 20 times discount on egress its still nowhere close, since i have to buy everything else - compute, storage are more expensive, and even with 5-10x discounts from list price its not worth it.

(Our cloud bills are in the millions as well, I am familiar with what discounts we can get)

[objektif]

Figma apparently spends around 300-400k/day on AWS. I think this puts them up there.

[mbreese]

How is this reasonable? At what point do they pull a Dropbox and de-AWS? I can’t think of why they would gain with AWS over in house hosting at that point.

I’m not surprised, but you’d think there would be some point where they would decide to build a data center of their own. It’s a mature enough company.

[direwolf20]

That $120m will become $12m when they're not using AWS.

[Quarrel]

> Hertzner's revenue is somewhere around $400m, so probably a little scary taking on an additional 30% revenue from a single customer

A little scare for both sides.

Unless we're misunderstanding something I think the $100Ms figure is hard to consider in a vacuum.

[weavie]

I'm largely just thinking $HUGE when throwing out that number, but there are plenty of companies that have cloud costs in that range. A quick search brings up Walmart, Meta, Netflix, Spotify, Snap, JP Morgan.