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Comment by blackaspen | Hacker News Reader

It's different for everyone.

If your 500 servers are for storage, S3/GCS will beat you in cost. For compute, that might be a different story, but then you still have to consider regionality, networking, etc.

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Let's be honest, even in the public cloud there are very few orgs that can survive regional failures and most people solve locality through CDN's for content delivery which means a private datacenter isn't really that different from public cloud for most orgs. Also, when when orgs move to the cloud they don't fire their networking team, they still have deskopts/laptops/servers/security devices/printers and large lans/wans to connect / peer already and these teams could staff up for private datacenter without really adding additional costs that aren't already incurred as part of doing business anyway. Our private datacenter is a few thousand servers leased space in a colo and we have one "datacenter dude" who handles hardware issues and our network team spends 90% of their time still on corporate infra vs actual supports with colo space. One can take some up front engineering/planning costs to scope out a private datacenter for about the same cost as it is to scope/plan VPC's and peering/connectivity/vpn services.

I completely agree. I jokingly tell everyone I know using AWS to "not use us-east1" and that they need to use another region not just AZs...and they always laugh and say "you were right" with us-east goes down.

At least from my view, there's a difference in backbone versus corporate space networking, but you're right, most everyone won't ever realize any savings from that side of things.

How often does us-east-1 go down? I know of about 4 big outages in the last 7 years but you're making it sound like it happens much more frequently. Is there a list of outages somewhere?

it's not just about it going down.. if you rely only on us-east they have had multiple times when you couldn't autoscale because there was no more capacity... if you rely on running lean and scale/up/scale down events us-east would have bitten your ass a lot the past year... Just for comparison sake even our private colo has had 0 issues the past decade that caused any interruptions to service

I do run such a service, one that must scale daily in response to traffic at multiples of off peak traffic and I can state unequivocally that this is false.

I can vaguely recall over the past several years single availability zones having short periods of time where single instance types were unavailable, but never the entire region... The idea that this happens "a lot in the past year" for the entire region isn't my experience at all.

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