There are many, MANY software companies whose infrastructure needs are on the order of single digits of normal-strength servers and who are profitable to the tune of millions of dollars a year. These aren’t companies staffed with penny-pinching optimization savants; some software, even at scale, just doesn’t need that kind of gear.

A multi million dollars tech company with tens of employees cannot run a sane infrastructure with a single digit of servers.

For a trivial website in production: 2 web servers + 1 database + 1 replica.

For internal tooling: 1 CI and build server + 2 development and testing servers + 1 storage, file share, ftp server + 1 backup server.

For desktop support: At least 1 server for DHCP, DNS, Active Directory + firewall + router.

That's already 10 servers and not counting networking equipment. Less than that and you're cutting corners.

Web servers - lambda

Build server - CodeBuild you either run with prebuilt Docker containers or you use a custom built Docker container that automatically gets launched when you push your code to GitHub/CodeCommit. No server involved.

Fileshare - a lot of companies just use Dropbox or OneDrive. No server involved

FTP - managed AWS SFTP Service. No server involved.

DHCP - Managed VPN Service by AWS. No server involved.

DNS - Route 53 and with Amazon Certificate Manager it will manage SSL certificates attached to your load balancer and CDN and auto renew. No servers involved.

Active Directory - Managed by AWS no server involved.

Firewall and router - no server to Manage. You create security groups and attach them to your EC2 instances, databases, etc.

You set your routing table up and attach it to your VMs.

Networking equipment and routers - again that’s a CloudFormatiom template or go old school and just configuration on a website.

Yes I realize SFTP is not FTP. But I also realize that no one in their right mind is going to deliver data over something as insecure as FTP in 2019.

We weren’t allowed to use regular old FTP in the early 2000s when I was working for a bill processor. We definitely couldn’t use one now and be compliant with anything.

I was trying to give you the benefit of a doubt.

Amateur mistake that proves you have no experience running any this.

If it doesn’t give you a clue the 74 in my name is the year I was born. I’ve been around for awhile. My first internet enabled app was over the gopher protocol.

How else do you think I got shareware from the info-Mac archives over a 7 bit line using the Kermit protocol if not via ftp? Is that proof enough for you or do I need to start droning on about how to optimize 65C02 assembly language programs by trying to store as much data in the first page of memory because reading from the first page took two clock cycles on 8 bit Apple //e machines instead of 3?

We don’t “share” large files. We share a bunch of Office docs and PDF’s as do most companies.

Yes, you do have to run DNS, Active Directory + VPN. You said you couldn’t do it without running “servers”.

No we don’t have servers called

SFTP-01

ADFS-01

Etc.

either on prem or in the cloud.

Even most companies that I’ve worked for that don’t use a cloud provider have their servers at a colo.

We would still be using shares hosted somewhere not on prem. How is that different from using one of AWS storage gateway products.

9 servers (8 reads and 1 writer) running all of the time with asynchronous replication (as opposed to synchronous replication) with duplicate data - yes the storage is shared between all of the replicas.

Not to mention the four lower environments some of which the databases are automatically spun up from 0 and scaled up as needed (Aurora Serverless)

Should we also maintain those same read replicas servers in our other environments when we want to do performance testing?

Should we maintain servers overseas for our outsourced workers?

Here we are just talking about Aurora/MySQL databases. I haven’t even gotten into our VMs, load balancer, object store (S3), queueing server (or lack there of since we use SQS/SNS), our OLAP database (Redshift - no we are not “locked in” it users standard Postgres drivers), etc.

AWS is not about saving money on like for like resources as you would on bare metal, but in the case of databases where your load is spiky you do. It’s about provisioning resources as needed when needed and not having to either pay as many infrastructure folks. Heck before my manager who hired me and one other person came in, the company had no one onsite that had any formal AWS expertise. They completely relied on a managed service provider - who they pay much less than they would pay for one dedicated infrastructure guy.

I’m first and foremost a developer/lead/software architect (depending on which way the wind is blowing at any given point in my career), but yes I have managed infrastructure on prem as part of my job years ago, including replicated MySQL servers. There is absolutely no way that I could spin up and manage all of the resources I need for a project and develop at the efficacy level at a colo as I can with just a CloudFormation template with AWS.

I’ve worked at a company that rented stacks of servers that sat idle most of the time but we used to simulate thousands of mobile connections to our backend servers - we did large B2B field services deployments. Today, it would be running a Pythom script that spun up an autoscaling group of VMs to whatever number we needed.