Re:We saved millions in SSD costs by upgrading our filesystem
by tgsovlerkhgsel on Wednesday November 10, 2021 @01:32AM
(#29171730)
I'm not surprised.
Scale makes IT cheaper, and AWS has scale. That means the actual total cost (not what is paid to Amazon, but what it actually costs to run) for something running on AWS will almost always be lower than a custom data center, due to the one-off reinvent-the-wheel work you'd have to do to run your own.
The only remaining question is, who keeps the savings. AWS can make a nice profit by selling their services at a higher price than it costs them to provide their part, but still cheaper than running your own data center. That means AWS will always be able to provide you the service cheaper than if you build your own.
Whether they're also willing to do that is another question, but it seems logical. At list prices, it's probably not worth running in AWS, but I highly doubt someone doing petabyte scale is paying list prices. Amazon has every motivation to provide a hefty discount to make the "own datacenter" approach unattractive.
Scale makes IT cheaper, and AWS has scale. That means the actual total cost (not what is paid to Amazon, but what it actually costs to run) for something running on AWS will almost always be lower than a custom data center, due to the one-off reinvent-the-wheel work you'd have to do to run your own.
The only remaining question is, who keeps the savings. AWS can make a nice profit by selling their services at a higher price than it costs them to provide their part, but still cheaper than running your own data center. That means AWS will always be able to provide you the service cheaper than if you build your own.
Whether they're also willing to do that is another question, but it seems logical. At list prices, it's probably not worth running in AWS, but I highly doubt someone doing petabyte scale is paying list prices. Amazon has every motivation to provide a hefty discount to make the "own datacenter" approach unattractive.