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Comment by kyledrake | Hacker News Reader

Right now I spend $240-600/mo for 192TB of bandwidth. I just used AWS's calculator and they charge $38,876.48/mo for the same thing.

I don't subscribe to the theory that this is "the future".

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Indeed. It's a big cost escalator. We have split architecture across two DCs we own and AWS. AWS is a bad deal when you get to our size. If we moved our DCs entirely into AWS we would literally triple costs overnight. On top of that, once it's in AWS, a lot of the services that they provide aren't portable. You're stuck and it's expensive to unstick these. The tooling isn't very mature either. You'd be surprised how difficult it is moving 22TiB of file storage to S3.

The future is bare metal IaaS with something non-provider specific that sits on that as that is 100% portable between Cloud/in house. Docker/openstack that sort of thing.

>You'd be surprised how difficult it is moving 22TiB of file storage to S3.

Really? I deal with this daily. Can you email randhunt@amazon.com - if you're genuinely having or had issues moving 22TiB to S3 please LMK as that's abnormal for our customers and I want to fix it for you and others.

Thanks have passed your details on to our expert in this space.

For the public record this was mainly down to the problem of client reliability and migrating data live when there are 8,000 people hammering it with reads and writes. We went for a read/write through system and background synchronisation. The latter we had real reliability problems with and the upload performance wasn't great.

Also ROI didn't stack up in the end versus our SAN so we canned it.

Ok, if you guys pursue something like this again definitely check out something like storage gateway. It can help reduce the load in a live migration scenario like this.

The people that run their own infrastructure long ago realized that holding the key to mass consumption is the key to the control of the web. That's the thing they're all actually competing on. Good luck competing with them on it when they're controlling your rates. Cheap in, expensive out.

Imagine what would happen to AWS if more companies practiced the Amazon Leadership Principles [0]

Frugality

Accomplish more with less. Constraints breed resourcefulness, self-sufficiency and invention. There are no extra points for growing headcount, budget size or fixed expense.

Because you know Leadership Principles aren’t just a pretty inspirational wall hanging.

[0]https://www.amazon.jobs/principles

Look at the cost a different way: your data is clearly important and you just saved having to hire an ops person to help manage it part-time.

I get that this isn't reality though. Once you provision something the amount of maintenance is minimum if done well.

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