I don't think this article is news. The editorialized title in HN is unfortunate and I wish a mod can change it. The article talks about the reasons Dropbox decided to move 500PB storage into our own data centers. Also like the article mentions, "They still use AWS for some workloads".
Edit: Here is another HN submission of the same piece with the correct headline. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15257331
You could just as easily say it's amazing that Amazon allows a competitor like Netflix to run on it's platform. The reality is that relationship is more complex than that.
Amazon letting them run on AWS is brilliant as they get a piece of Netflix's pie. So even if Netflix beats Amazon Prime, Amazon gets to dip into their pot via revenues from AWS. It's a great hedging of bets.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/media-services/
(MSNBC would be a video streaming service that bears Microsoft's initials, but they sold off their stake in 2012)
AWS doesn't even let you do BGP. If you want to use them for a CDN, you're monopolized into their network and their blend of ridiculously overpriced bandwidth.
They might be using AWS for the canonical store of data, but the sanity of using "the cloud" goes out the window the second you need to ship a lot of traffic to the public internet.
For someone not at netflix's level, can you recommend somewhere with significantly cheaper bandwidth.
The thing is, even for smaller companies it's easy to get way better deals on bandwidth. I'm currently using a provider that runs openstack and I'm paying less than $0.009/GB, from the first byte(no commitment). I'd say that is very cheap compared to AWS pricing at $0.05/GB above 350 TB.
With colocation or renting dedicated servers and IP-transit you can get way lower prices. A dedicated 1 Gbps is about 300 USD/month with my provider, and the prices drops hard for dedicated 10, 40 and 100 Gbps uplinks.
Never used OVH myself, but they are providing 2 Gbps at £340/month for their highest quality bandwidth, and £64/month for bandwidth they think would be good for downloads.
I think using cloud providers for somewhat high bandwidth services are basically throwing money out the window. Until prices really drops(if they ever will) I'll continue thinking that clouds are for temporary workloads or prototyping with the ability to easily scale at a high cost.
Would you mind sharing who that is?
At $10k/mo what you do is plop a rack in one of the well connected buildings in NYC, VA, SF, SJC, CHI and get either flat rate 10Gs or 1G commits over 10Gs. You should be paying between 0.55 and 0.75 per Mbit/sec on 95th percentile on 1G commit. You put into the same cabinet your edge nodes that actually would be pushing the traffic out and use AWS or GCP for your compute workloads.
EDIT: I guess I was talking about CloudFront specifically, not EC2. EC2 is pretty pricey.
https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/ says $0.085/GB.
EDIT: I guess I was talking about CloudFront specifically, not EC2. EC2 is pretty pricey.
Wouldn't a customer the size of Netflix be granted more liberty in this regard?
Netflix rolls its own CDNs because Cloudfront can't meet all their demands, yet.
[1] https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/how-netflix-works-...
And,
> We rely on the cloud for all of our scalable computing and storage needs — our business logic, distributed databases and big data processing/analytics, recommendations, transcoding, and hundreds of other functions that make up the Netflix application. Video is delivered through Netflix Open Connect, our content delivery network that is distributed globally to efficiently deliver our bits to members’ devices.
Source: https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/completing-the-net...
Netflix still operates its own data centers and CDN to deliver video. This is not done on AWS.