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Comment by vidarh | Hacker News Reader

You can beat AWS on cost with pretty much any hosting provider (with some exceptions - e.g. Rackspace seems almost proud to be expensive). The 33% to 70% "discount" doesn't mean much when you then tie yourself into long term costs that are far more limiting than most manage hosting providers - so much for benefits of being able to scale up and down.

What really kills you on AWS are the insane bandwidth prices. Buying bandwidth elsewhere is often so much cheaper than AWS that the difference in bandwidth costs alone more than finances the servers.

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How is Netflix able to manage this so effectively and still serve ~30% of US traffic off AWS?

I've heard the non-AWS folks talk of these vendor lock ins or long term costs but aren't those irrelevant in 2016+? eg. microservices to reduce the issue of vendor lock in and long term costs on infrastructure that goes out of date every 2-3 years is a poor planning indicator no?

I can guarantee you that Netflix are not paying anything remotely like the advertised rates for EC2.

I know first hand the kind of discounts some companies much, much smaller than Netflix can get, and they are steep. EC2 is still expensive then too, but if you pay, say, a million a year to Amazon without massive discounts, you've not done your job when negotiating.

But yes, someone with the leverage Netflix has will be paying relatively reasonable rates for EC2 services. But pretty much nobody else has the leverage Netflix has.

> I've heard the non-AWS folks talk of these vendor lock ins or long term costs but aren't those irrelevant in 2016+?

Paying far above market rates is never going to be irrelevant, because if you pay above market and your competitor doesn't, chances are they'll have you for breakfast thanks to better margins.

Why in the world would you agree to pay above market rates to get locked in for 1-3 years when you can pay less on a month-by-month contract?

Netflix could even be paying less than cost, as a loss-leader for AWS.

Feels like AWS is less of a vendor lock than building it inhouse. Doing it all inhouse has a high upfront cost that must be realized over X years irrelevant of the outcome. On the other hand if one implemented a microservices architecture, moving off AWS month-to-month service to another provider is far easier. Did I miss something?

How is microservices related here? They're built in-house too. It's still just services/apps/code that has to run somewhere.

You can run it on AWS or somewhere else but moving is always a problem regardless.

There are no month-to-month costs with Amazon that I'm aware of. There are hour by hour, and 12 month and 36 month commitments.

Netflix does not stream content from AWS.

+1. Netflix.com is only the control plane, all content is served from CDNs.

The majority are all of Netflix's CDN traffic comes from their own CDN that they do not run on Amazon.

In fact, they don't even use the same hardware or software.

https://openconnect.netflix.com/software/

Keep in mind that Amazon (and others) uses the "roach motel" model for networking. Easy to check in, not so easy to check out.

When we looked at S3 for some archiving use cases, that came up as a risk -- if strategically it made more sense for us to adopt Google, Microsoft, etc, we would need to negotiate significant concessions from a new vendor to transition away from Amazon or take a hit during that period. You always need to plan for the exit!

You'll have similar issues on-premises (ie. dealing with EMC/etc), but many people forget that cloud providers have their own gotchas too.

I suspect Netflix is paying something a lot closer to AWS cost price than any of us will get.

TBH The cost of AWS isn't what concerns me so much as the massive vendor lock-in.

Vendor lock-in is an unavoidable cost of doing business. Even if you build literally everything yourself, which you shouldn't, you still have resources, processes, apis, automation, expertise amassed around a specific set of operating constraints.

Not only that, but if you invest significantly in any single technology, migrating to another technology is always going to be an extreme effort. Having led migrations from datacenters to AWS, AWS to Digital Ocean, RabbitMQ to NSQ to SNS+SQS, etc., I can say at this point that I do not believe in vendor lock-in as a legitimate reason to disqualify any particular solution.

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