"AWS is sucsessfull becouse there is no capital tied to hardware for the leasers. For some reason it is what executives prefer."
Your execs are probably right.
Capital outlays are expensive and risky and imply a structural lock-in - but that's just the tip of the iceberg.
"A 1000USD server is in practice impossible for me to order at work"
And what about hosting? Networking gear? Support? Repairs and upgrades? Networking security? And how will those servers integrate with the rest of your outlay?
AWS is ridiculously cheap compared to the alternatives in most scenarios and that's why it's so successful.
AWS/Cloud enables so much more, far more dynamically - the value is considerable.
In some situations, if you have a fairly big need for computing, and it's predictable over long time-frames, and those services don't need to be tightly integrated with other cloud services, and you have the internal know-how to keep them running, the cost obviously savings can be achieved, but this is an optimization.
Put on your Eng/Ops/Business Hat for a minute and consider why services like AWS are exploding and growing to be one of the biggest segments in tech? Because 'stupid executives'? No - it's because the value add is fairly immense.
> AWS is ridiculously cheap compared to the alternatives in most scenarios and that's why it's so successful.
It's so successful because a lot of engineers selecting what to rent never see the invoices and don't understand the costs of colo or managed servers. You see it all over this discussion e.g. with people assuming a rack or two requires full time staff when you can get sufficient on-call resources on retainer for a few hundred a month or so depending on complexity of the setup most places.
Having ordered, configured, set up, hired staff for and run both colo setups, managed servers, and AWS setups many times I've yet to see AWS be remotely competitive on price ever, to the point that when I did contracting I used to offer clients to transition their systems to managed hosting (whether managed or colo comes out cheapest depends on scale and location - e.g. I'm in London and real-estate prices here are too high for colo to typically beat managed servers if you can deal with ~8ms round-trip to providers in Germany or France; for others managed is necessary to be close to customers) for a percentage of their first 3-6 months of reduced cost. That was costs including their devops contracts and monitoring etc.
I use AWS. It has lots of great features, and sometimes those features are worth the cost, but it's the expensive luxury option of hosting.
> Put on your Eng/Ops/Business Hat for a minute and consider why services like AWS are exploding and growing to be one of the biggest segments in tech? Because 'stupid executives'? No - it's because the value add is fairly immense.
I've done this for 25 years, including private cloud setups from before AWS was a thing, and I've had to yell at execs that wanted to triple our monthly costs because AWS sales had whispered buzzwords into their ears. That was the all in costs. It took a massive effort to explain it to them even with the numbers in black and white in front of their faces.
So, yeah, a lot of the time (not always), it is "stupid" executives. Sometimes talked into it by engineers working around planning processes that makes paying by use an easy end-run around budgeting.
The biggest achievement of AWS is to sell the idea that it is cheap because Amazon.
Triple the cost of on-prem is pretty good. Whenever I’ve run numbers for storage it has been in the 10-50x range.
This is for cost optimized on-prem storage vs ebs or s3. I check the actual workload and space utilization, and give amazon every benefit of the doubt to get the ratio that low.
It probably doesn’t help that a $100 Samsung EVO (500GB) can do 500K IOPS, but that the storage would cost $62.50 per month on a provisioned IOPS EBS volume. At a five year amortization, thats 37.5 times more expensive than buying. (EBS has poor durability by design, so you end up keeping the same number of copies on prem or in EBS.)
At that point, it’s basically game over, so it doesn’t matter that the IOPS would cost $32,500 per month.
Note: I always include the cost of the scale out infrastructure, etc in the comparisons, but with that, on prem is competitive even if the cluster is 10% full on average and does vintage stuff like triplicating data instead of erasure coding.
Not the person you’re replying to, but here’s another way of thinking of it: A $1000 server can sit under my desk, no problem. The TCO comes down to the cost of my productivity with the AWS bill as a second order effect.
If the ops team can’t manage >>10 machines for the price of me managing one, there’s something horribly wrong.
They should just let the developer buy the $1000 machine if it will help productivity.
That doesn’t mean production should run on a pile of machines under someone’s desk. That’s a different scenario.
Your execs are probably right.
Capital outlays are expensive and risky and imply a structural lock-in - but that's just the tip of the iceberg.
"A 1000USD server is in practice impossible for me to order at work"
And what about hosting? Networking gear? Support? Repairs and upgrades? Networking security? And how will those servers integrate with the rest of your outlay?
AWS is ridiculously cheap compared to the alternatives in most scenarios and that's why it's so successful.
AWS/Cloud enables so much more, far more dynamically - the value is considerable.
In some situations, if you have a fairly big need for computing, and it's predictable over long time-frames, and those services don't need to be tightly integrated with other cloud services, and you have the internal know-how to keep them running, the cost obviously savings can be achieved, but this is an optimization.
Put on your Eng/Ops/Business Hat for a minute and consider why services like AWS are exploding and growing to be one of the biggest segments in tech? Because 'stupid executives'? No - it's because the value add is fairly immense.