> who says you have to run a DC if you're not on aws? did i say that, or did you project that onto me?
I didn't. In fact I even suggested that moving away from AWS wouldn't make sense even if you only needed a few racks. Less than that and it makes even less financial sense to self-host unless you've got really compelling compliance issues.
> how about hiring a smaller company that can do it for you, for half the cost?
Well...
> i know why not, because you think they're going to fuck it all up, get you fired, and you'll be homeless and ashamed. and so back to amazon you go.
I was going to say that a lot of the inertia with AWS is due to feeling like we get a good value and at that size decent support. From what I can tell I either worked for a very anomalous company or you're mostly grasping at straws. A few things though:
- No, I wouldn't worry about being fired for choosing a vendor that didn't pan out. Short of committing a felony that would reflect poorly on the company admin action wasn't even a possibility. Large companies move very, very slowly (if at all).
- No, we're not desperately looking for alternatives to AWS. There's some unhappiness with cost, but mostly that's a capex vs opex go fellate the corporate radiers kinda thing and less of an actually saving money kinda thing.
- No, you're not going to save us 75%, 50%, or likely even 30%. We had enough cruft in our AWS stuff alone that culling 10-25% (depending on the product) was relatively painless.
- No, we don't feel like we're getting ripped off. At that kind of monthly spend you get plenty of attention from Amazon. And not the used-car-salesman kind of attention.
Ultimately, at that scale, few decisions were made because they'd save money up front which seems like your main selling point. As an example from the hardware side: there's a reason why vendors like Cisco and Juniper still do very well in the enterprise environment and vendors like Ubiquiti and MikroTik don't (despite the latter offering 10GBE equipment for under $200).