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Comment by distantsounds | Hacker News Reader

This is such a meaningless statement. What exactly are you trying to convey?

Don't ever use services provided by a third party. That's why I cut my own hair, make my own toothpaste, and create my own electricity from coal I mine myself!

>not generating it in a home-made hamster wheel magnetic generator

And if you want toasted bread, don't buy that $5 toaster, but source your own: http://www.thetoasterproject.org/page2.htm

Your comparison, and the toaster one by the responder, are nonsensical. There's a difference between a product and a service. Toothpaste is a product, not a service. AWS is a service, not a product. You can buy toothpaste anywhere; if you want to compare with AWS, AWS is like hiring a dental hygienist to come to your house twice a day and brush your teeth for you instead of doing it yourself. The hair-cutting bit is valid, but lots of people cut their own hair, especially men. The electricity bit is only partially valid; coal is a commodity that you can buy, just like toothpaste. You can also buy solar panels and make yourself totally independent of the electric utility. But it falls down because electric utilities are utilities and are regulated as such, whereas AWS is not regulated. The toaster thing is just dumb; toasters are cheap commodities. Again, the AWS comparison is hiring a butler to make your toast for you.

Bush league... I perfarmd my owne brained sugery Las week.

There's always a danger when you rely on outside provider for something that's critical to your business or life. Sometimes you can't avoid it or it's completely infeasible to, but choose carefully.

I see too many companies using AWS for stuff they could fairly easily self-host.

By "self-host", don't you mean "rely on a landlord / ISP / colocation facility"?

No, if it's for non-web-hosting stuff, I mean buying your own servers and administering them yourself.

Obviously, web-hosting stuff is a little different. AWS is a lot more than just web hosting: it's a cloud computing provider.

Back in days we rented servers and created our env, it was not really that hard. And it was super easy to move from one provider to another.

> Back in days we rented servers

As you do with AWS...

> and created our env

As you do with AWS...

> And it was super easy to move from one provider to another.

Which is easier on cloud hosting than it ever was when dealing with colocation providers.

Well it's not quite the same with AWS if you start making use of any of their facilities past straight EC2 instances.

AWS provides a number of SAAS offerings which, if you make use of them, tie you to Amazon specifically, as opposed to an IAAS offering which is likely to be more easily portable to another provider.

AWS created a Cambrian explosion of people hosting stuff that have no business doing so. Those people can't just go back to colocating hardware at datacenters... I wonder if they could even effectively get their equipment racked and wired up.

Having to get approval for a capital expense was a filter that prevented teams with zero ops experience from trying to just brute-force google their way through.

The teams I see the most often, in pre-cloud days got nothing done because touching a server meant going through experienced ops teams that could conduct architecture reviews, security reviews and maintenance planning but which didn't have any motivation or incentives to actually launch new products. Cloud means these teams can get things done, at the expense of not having any thought put to architecture, security, or maintenance.

Sure, it's not hard, but it's not possible for them.

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