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Re:Twitter ‘smytes’ customers by busterarm on Friday June 22, 2018 @11:11AM (#17374549)
The idea I'm floating isn't not to use AWS, it's to not be locked into it. Don't use the things that only they offer.

This isn't just about cloud provider lock-in, but something you need to do to have a good DR strategy.

Back on that Christmas Day that Linode got DDOSed, my company was 100% on their infrastructure. I only had to work a couple of hours that day because I had worked and planned in advance to launch our infrastructure on another host. I saved my company from a multi-million dollar loss that day.

Re:Twitter ‘smytes’ customers by scarface74 on Friday June 22, 2018 @11:17AM (#17374609)
So if you're using AWS and instead of using their services, you're just hosting your own equivalents on EC2 instances, what's the point? The entire reason behind using AWS is the "undifferentiated heavy lifting" - allowing them to take most of the burden off of you except where your company can add value.

If all you're doing is hosting a bunch of VPS's, you're really not saving yourself too much over just using a bunch of colocated servers. You can also get much cheaper, less reliable, less geographic diverse hosting somewhere else.

But I would have my head handed to me if I even suggested to a company to base their entire infrastructure on Linode instead of AWS, Azure, or even GCP.

Re:Twitter ‘smytes’ customers by busterarm on Friday June 22, 2018 @11:35AM (#17374778)
There isn't one way or reason to use cloud infrastructure. Maybe for smaller companies the "undifferentiated heavy lifting" narrative makes sense and I've used it as such in the past.

Managing tens of millions of dollars in physical and cloud infrastructure at multiple providers/dcs for a publicly traded company like I am now? No, that's not the reason to use cloud infrastructure at all. Cloud in this case is more about capacity planning and avoiding managing hardware inventory than anything.

Re:Twitter ‘smytes’ customers by scarface74 on Friday June 22, 2018 @12:06PM (#17375049)
You realize that this is exactly what Netflix is doing? They are using a lot of AWS services and have completely tied their fate to AWS.
Re:Twitter ‘smytes’ customers by busterarm on Friday June 22, 2018 @12:30PM (#17375277)
That's not entirely true now but has been in the past. They've actually tied their fates to both AWS and GCE in different parts of their infrastructure. The obvious example of this is the one or two global outages they've had due to misconfiguration in GCE this year.

I know their video encoding platform is heavily tied to AWS because the teams that built it optimized for cost (which for them makes a certain amount of sense) and they massively parallelize the encoding work. I talked to some of their engineers at re:Invent last year and it was kind of interesting. They aren't using a lot of AWS-specific stuff though, just AWS EC2 reserved instances.

I don't think that just because they're Netflix that everything they're doing is correct. This can't possibly be true.