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All good questions. The answer is pretty long winded. In short, we love our bare metal and you are not going to be able to rip it out of our cold dead hands. It is stable, fast and cost efficient. Now for the long winded: 1. We do have a decent amount of spares but not a ton. Our contracts require replacement parts within hours to a day. Some items like F5 gear we have two and no spare. They just replace their gear in hours. 2. Each data center has 24/7 support that can do some minor tasks. 3. Yes, Networking is a pain and you need the right people to do it. It is not cheap either! Luckily our VP of Tech Ops is a networking guru.You mess up networking and you are hosed. Our first networking guy wasn't exactly Tops! So, we know first hand. Having said all of that, for us there are economies of scale. It is the case if we want to test different machines, databases or any other combination at scale it could cost us several hundred thousand dollars just to run the tests. Yep, we have dropped over 100k for testing at scale. Its simply not sustainable and an irresponsible way to spend investors cash. Also, when you add in multiple environments for dev, test, staging and integration you can quickly see we consume a lot of boxes. So, many in fact, a lot of colocation/cloud services will not work with us unless we plop down large amounts of cash. Let's also factor in AWS wants large up front spend for reserved instances. Thus, if you need the capital to get the amount of compute you need to run your business it is not very hard just to call Dell, Cisco, Nimbix, Equinix or any other vendor and negotiate our own deals. If any of these companies can get half our spend a year they are willing to at least talk. |