Re:We saved millions in SSD costs by upgrading our filesystem
by aaronblohowiak on Tuesday November 09, 2021 @06:22PM
(#29168924)
Comparing a 6 month leadtime to a 6 minute leadtime is... not fun. Even if you have a stable peak to mean, success happens and that can cause firedrills, etc.
Re:We saved millions in SSD costs by upgrading our filesystem
by jjav on Tuesday November 09, 2021 @10:00PM
(#29170572)
It doesn't take six months to order a new server. You can often have it tomorrow (for some extra fee) or in a week or so. Done this many times since the first ~20 or so years of my career were running our own datacenters.
You're right, hypergrowth (a subset of unpredictable capacity needs) is a perfect use case for AWS or similar.
The vast majority of companies, for the majority of their corporate life, aren't in these categories (spiky, unpredictably) phase though, so for those, AWS is a large cost premium.
To be fair, you can't get hardware added in AWS via API call either. What you can do is spin up instances/storage/etc via API call, as long as that spare capacity hardware is already set up, available and ready to be allocated to you. Which you can also do on on-prem hardware.
If you're saying that your utilization is so peaky or unpredictable that you end up needing an order of magnitude more, or fewer, resources available day to day, then you are absolutely correct that provisioning so much spare capacity on-prem would be prohibitive. This is an use-case where AWS excels.
But if your utilization doesn't have dramatic peaks and growth is mostly predictable, then it becomes practical to provision for it on-prem and it'll be a lot cheaper.