Bad title.
They didn't switch from AWS to private cloud.
They consolidated 60 data centers with 200k servers to 23 data centers and 70k servers.
They didn't switch from AWS to private cloud.
They consolidated 60 data centers with 200k servers to 23 data centers and 70k servers.
This isn't a religious argument. Some workloads are fine on prem (known load profiles, shed infrequent traffic spikes instead of bursting), some need cloud (Netflix.com, remember all of their video content streams from their own CDN hardware), it's ensuring you're making the decision in an objective way. Sort of, but not quite, similar to making software budget and timeline estimates.
If software is eating the world, and every company is turning into a software company, why would you be surprised that orgs above a certain size wouldn't also turn into an infrastructure company? You don't have to compete against Amazon, you just need to satisfy your engineering needs for your vertical and the software that drives it. Amazon needs to be everything to everyone.
The big 3 clouds have built a nice moat and can charge whatever they want. They still compete on prices but it's clear they're colluding on network fees at least.
From this article: https://www.platformonomics.com/2018/05/follow-the-capex-sep...
Oddly enough, they falter in other areas: no equivalent to Kinesis Firehose, and true to your point, I was told by customer service just to build my own DataFlow job to take a Pubsub topic and make files.
It's like some of their product managers have a very customer-first mindset (BigQuery, Pubsub) and some could not care less.
Inside your dev team, every institutional bit of knowledge about how AWS works, how to configure it, how to work around their mostly bad docs, and how to navigate their hot garbage UI.
Every line of code that touches an AWS api.
If you need data centers in certain regions for eg localization laws, AWS is afaik the only choice.