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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

I happen to spend a fair amount of time in and around non-tech Fortune 500 companies. Almost all of them still have either their own data centers, or a "we'll run your mess for less" type contract (non-cloud) with companies like Rackspace, HP, etc. I suspect the same applies for government agencies at all levels.

I would guess that a fair amount of the potential cloud growth is in migrating all of that to the cloud, either as an actual migration, or as some new solution built in a cloud that retires an in-house hosted solution.

The eventual consolidation of all of that into a pretty small number of big players (Amazon/Google/Microsoft) is a bit concerning in that the reduced diversity of solutions opens up some security, reliability, competitive cost, etc, concerns.

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> I would guess that a fair amount of the potential cloud growth is in migrating all of that to the cloud, either as an actual migration, or as some new solution built in a cloud that retires an in-house hosted solution.

Depends on the workload. If your workload is predictable, and you don't need "scale to infinity on a dime", buying your own hardware and amortizing over 3-5 years is typically much cheaper (~40% savings, roughly) than what AWS offers.

Amazon seems to be having success selling AWS as a landing point for things that are predictable and don't need instant scaling.

Edit: The context here is about non-tech Fortune 500 companies, Government Agencies, etc...and the very large amount of existing "non cloud" opportunity they present for the likes of Amazon. Think General Mills, American Airlines, CVS, Kroger, etc.

For example: https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/dole/

Sure, it's odd they think running Sharepoint on AWS is saving them money, but they moved :)

Lots of people sell things people don't need. There's something to be said for marketing.

Github and Stackoverflow, to name two that come to mind, run on their own hardware in a datacenter. Backblaze built out its own storage system in a datacenter due to how much cheaper it was than AWS' S3 system.

I think AWS is a wonderful system to prototype in, before you move to your own gear if you're profitable. But every dollar you spend in AWS is gone once its spent; with new US Section 179 deduction rules, you can immediately write off $500K/year in hardware costs. That means that you own that hardware forever. That might not matter to a Fortune 50 or 500 business, but it matters a lot to small to midsized businesses.

Disclaimer: I do devops/infrastructure, and love AWS, but also don't believe in spending more than you must for a solution.

And if it's working fine, or you are abit tight for cash, you can stretch it out a couple years more if you own it. Not so if you are renting, and that goes for software too. Looking at you Adobe.

>I suspect the same applies for government agencies at all levels.

I wonder if AWS has made any headway after their initial CIA contract making them a private AWS instance.

It's called GovCloud. AWS has obtained FISMA certification for use as a government provider.

AFAIK, the CIA uses a hybrid setup with the government hosting very large data centers of their own for data and AWS being used to build front-ends that access that data.

It's important to consider the sheer scale of government resources. They run at least one of their own private cloud providers. They're just not accessible to the 'outside' world.

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