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Comment by CodeSheikh | Hacker News Reader

I am a bit surprised. Why host Netflix application on Amazon EC2 and not have your own data centers? A startup hosting at Amazon EC2 makes sense

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Why Netflix chose AWS: http://techblog.netflix.com/2010/12/four-reasons-we-choose-a...

Also Quora answer: https://www.quora.com/Why-does-Netflix-use-Amazon-EC2

The reason that strikes me as most important is #2 "Letting Amazon focus on data center infrastructure allows our engineers to focus on building and improving our business."

Too many companies roll their own solutions when they could take advantage of economies of scale like this and let another company dominate the problem.

Obviously there are privacy reasons to own your own data but I don't think they outweigh the performance and efficiency implications.

aws and performance :) Crappy performance and poor uptime is precisely why people move off aws.

So, um, why does Netflix always seem to be up/performant?

Because they actually know how to implement fault tolerant scale on AWS. Most companies don't have simian army randomly wrecking infrastructure. Many companies/engineers think they can spin up a few (or few hundred) ec2 instances and think they have solved resiliency.

AWS is a tool, not a bullet made of silver.

They are shifting capex to opex. The complexity of solution that can perform OK on aws is significantly higher then complexity of solution that runs on metal. There are use cases for which aws will never be a viable option. AWS in general is a bad option for anyone but Netflix (Netflix consumes over 30% of aws resources if they make a mistake that causes even 30-40% spike all AWS customers are f#$ed)

> Too many companies roll their own solutions when they could take advantage of economies of scale like this and let another company dominate the problem.

Too many companies build their business completely reliant on a single service provider that can/will change focus, increase costs, terminate/change service offerings, or have unreliable service availability.

Thanks.

Why is that surprising? If you're not in the infrastructure business, why would you build infrastructure? It's like criticizing an auto manufacturer for not manufacturing their own tires.

If you mean that AWS prices are too high, I think you're thinking in terms of retail prices. If you have enough volume, AWS will negotiate a volume discount.

Netflix accounts for a huge chunk of the national bandwidth. They have specialized needs when it comes to hosting that no other company on the planet has.

I imagine Netflix has sweetheart deals with AWS that net them significantly cheaper costs and dedicated teams of support staffers, given their size.

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