Agree. AWS and the likes is an awesome tool to get access to a lot of compute power quickly which is great for unexpectedly large workloads or experimenting during early stages. For established businesses/processes the cost of running on premises is often significantly lower.

We manage about 150T of data for company on relatively inexpensive raid array + one replica + offline backup. It is accessible on our 10Gbps intranet for processing cluster, users to pull to their workstations, etc. The whole thing is running on stock HP servers for many years and never had outages beyond disks (which are in raid) predicting failure and maybe one redundant PSU failure. We did the math of replicating what we have with Amazon or Google and it would cost a fortune.

Would love to hear more about that business — do you help people go from cloud back to on-prem?

We're all about mixed mode. Let's never pretend that we ought focus on a specific one and only business. Clients like Amazon, clients like Azure - clients then get forced by (say the BC Health Authority) to run on physical machines in a British Columbia hosted datacenter.

We help make that happen, and help folks manage the lifecycle associated with it.

Companies just really suck at managing hardware or resources. The bigger and the more consultants they get, the more terrible they get, that's what you come after.

Chances are you will find tens of instances without any naming or tagging, of the more expensive types, created by previous dudes who long left. Thanks to AWS tooling it's easy to identify them, see if they use any resource and either delete or scale down dramatically.

It's not a size thing - it's all companies, and it's about significantly more than just 'finding instances'. The 'finding instances' side of AWS is something we just do for free (AWS, Azure, etc) for our existing customers.

Our goal is to provide actual value and do real DevOps work, regardless of whether you're AWS, Azure, GCP, etc. This includes physical, mixed-mode, cloud bursting, and changing constantly. <----- That's what keeps it interesting.

If that were universally true, then why did Netflix go all in on AWS?

hype maybe? Got a backroom deal for the exposure? Oh, and you probably aren't netflix either. But they have a pretty severe case of vendor lock in now, will be interesting to see how it plays out. As of 2018 they spend 40 million on cloud services, 23 million of that on aws.

Do you think you are gonna get AWS's attention with that $10 s3 instance when something goes wrong?!? You will have negative leverage after signing up for vendor lock in.

I'll take linux servers any day, thanks.

So you think Netflix was suckered into using AWS and if they had just listened to random people on HN they would have made different choices?

I’m sure with all of your developers using the repository pattern to “abstract their database access”, you can change your database at the drop of a dime.

Companies rarely change infrastructure wholesale no matter how many levels of abstraction you put in front of your resources.

While at the same time you’re spending money maintaining hardware instead of focusing on your business’s competitive advantage.

so, you might be dealing with some half/truths here.

Netflix does NOT use aws for their meat and potatoes streaming, just the housekeeping. They use OWS for the heavy lifting.

https://www.networkworld.com/article/3037428/netflix-is-not-...

But re: maintaining hardware, I only maintain my dev box these days. We are fine with hosted linux services, but backup/monitoring/updating is just too trivial, and the hosting so affordable (and predictable) w/linux it would have to be a hype/marketing/nepotic decision to switch to aws in our case. The internet is still built on a backbone and run by linux, any programmer would be foolhardy to ignore that bit of reality for very long.

So what do you think AWS services are running on if not Linux?

Netflix is by far AWSs largest customer.

From the horses mouth on why they decided to move to AWS:

https://www.se-radio.net/2014/12/episode-216-adrian-cockcrof...

You could also go to YouTube and watch any of the dozens of talks NetFlix has done at ReInvent.

Of course Netflix caches it’s videos in the ISPs data center. But caching is not the “heavy lifting”.

Please do not spread falsehoods.