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Comment by 40acres | Hacker News Reader

Once you reach a certain size I think it makes sense to explore rolling your own infrastructure but for an MVP or early stage startup not having to worry about infrastructure has got to be a god send. I recall hearing Kevin Systrom (Instagram) talk about how the app kept crashing on launch while it was being hosted on his single laptop. Imagine if he had EC2 :) (not that they needed it to grow)

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You only need to look at how well PUBG has handled the load of quickly becoming one of the most popular games to see the benefits of AWS.

Yeah, their server software itself sucks a bit (low tick-rate, odd "de-sync"), but scaling itself has not been any issue: it feels the same now as it did with a tenth or a hundredth of the players it has right now.

Compare that to the growing pains that, for example, league of legends had, where even several years in the whole of EUW would be practically down on weekends. (log in "queue" over 9000)

I think the problem is more serverless architectures than EC2. If you build for EC2 you can probably fairly easily migrate between hosts (at least, for our codebase it is). But if you build for Amazon Lambda there's more vendor lock in.

How so? My Python Lambda functions have almost zero AWS boilerplate besides passing in the event and context to the function whether I use it or not.

I would argue that real infrastructure or vendor "lock in" is due to the friction of learning the API's associated with each cloud platform. Obviously, one can choose to use all the services of the cloud platform they will deploy to. However, and in most cases, that is not a strict requirement to use the cloud platform to begin with. "Lock in" seems more like a self-created problem than anything.

Likewise. My lambda code can all be run outside of the lambda environment and retain full functionality. Each module has a small translation layer to take in the event and context before marshaling execution to other functions.

> I would argue that real infrastructure or vendor "lock in" is due to the friction of learning the API's associated with each cloud platform.

And it's not just cloud platforms. Every tool you use becomes more engrained the more you use it.

Put plainly: It seems silly to me how people will shout "vendor lock-in" when using a service like DynamoDB or Kinesis, but will be more than happy to learn how to set up and maintain a Cassandra or Kafka cluster, along with Zookeeper, Puppet/Chef, and all that goes along with it. Those are not insignificant costs!

I get that those aren't vendor-specific, but at some point you're just doing a lot more work, maintenance, and tying yourself down to a stack (and whatever employees became experts in them), and for what benefit? So you'll theoretically be able to move away faster if AWS goes rogue, long after your startup gains traction?

I think those reflexively dismissing cloud services due to vendor lock-in need to take a step back and look at the big picture.

It's unimportant until it is.

Costs are high for aws. You might be able to pay a little more now but when you need to scale you may find you are priced off of aws.

You're not paying more to start out. It will be far, far cheaper to just use Kinesis / Lambda / S3 than to pay someone to learn about, set up, manage, and maintain remotely comparable infrastructure. It will take far less code, infrastructure, maintenance, know-how, and time. It's not even close.

More importantly, though: you quite possibly won't ever find yourself "priced off of aws." Netflix isn't. Workday isn't. Spotify isn't. Pinterest isn't. Dropbox only transitioned off very recently (reportedly for more control). Some of the biggest players on the web were able to scale and grow beyond most of our wildest dreams without it holding them back, yet still some recommend adding significant man-hours and complexity up-front just on the off-chance it becomes necessary after it's successful?

Let's be realistic here.

The pattern I've seen is that AWS makes sense for startups, then you hit a point where you need a hundred hosts in a couple of data centers and you can do that more cheaply with raw hardware and a small team to handle it. Then you hit a point where you need thousands or tens of thousands of servers in multiple countries and you need to handle legal and logistic concerns and it's better to be in AWS (or GCE or whatever) again. That's the reason I've heard that Netflix and a lot of the other big companies are there.

you only get priced off of aws at the extremely high end and the extremely low end. in between you either have huge savings in staffing costs or you have huge leverage to negotiate better rates with aws

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