The biggest reason people pay for S3 is because of data transfer cost to other cloud services they are using.
Only someone who had never done this would say this.
Fundamentally you’re playing a commodity game and that means you need a consistent edge to be worth the fixed costs. If your fully-loaded advantage is less than, say, 30% you’re better off negotiating with your AWS rep and investing your engineering resources in something your customers want.
You just plug it in and basically it runs. Thats pretty much it.
Having to explain to an HN audience how installing an SSD is trivial is weird.
If you don't pay the premium for redundancy, your S3 is the same sitting duck as the single SSD in your office, albeit an expensive one. Thinking AWS and therefore integrity and security is magical thinking.
Ask those who lost their data in Bahrain AWS.
But you are entitled to your expensive opinion. Some of us just don't buy it is all.
No, that was literally the first paragraph of my original comment.
> If you don't pay the premium for redundancy, your S3 is the same sitting duck as the single SSD in your office, albeit an expensive one.
Again, this is misunderstanding what the service provides relative to raw storage. I suggest reading the documentation about reliability and thinking about how that SSD in your office fails to provide either geographic redundancy (which all but the one-zone flavor of S3 has) or bitrot protection. Similarly, while it is true that some security concerns still require you to configure things correctly, you should think about the infrastructure you would need to build to match the core service: none of that is something you can’t match but building and operating that has costs.
> Ask those who lost their data in Bahrain AWS.
Let’s think about this slightly longer: how is the SSD in your Bahrain office doing? Iran has to hit multiple AWS data centers to lose your S3 data so to match that you need to build a system which syncs changes at multiple separate campuses in the region, which is significantly more expensive, and when you realize that you probably want a copy somewhere far away, the work to build that will be more than checking a box — and don’t forget that you have to regularly test all of this to make sure you can trust it to work in a disaster.
Again, as readers of the original comment know, I’m not saying just you can’t do this but that it’s a category error to think the comparison is the raw hardware and not the combination of redundant hardware, software, and staffing you need to match capabilities. You can beat that with enough scale but that’s a very different equation.
You shifted the conversation to redundancy and how AWS provides bells and whistles. You are consistent in your position, just not with me and not with PunchyHamster because we both are comparing costs by self hosting.
And for those of you who are willing to pay the premium and don't care about costs, like you, would obviously find AWS attractive.
For a startup like ours and many others, cost is everything. And spending a day or two for bitrot protection and having a couple of SSDs for redundancy and scalability is a no brainer.
You don't need big buildings for resilience. I suggest building things that require real scaling and resilience and you would know that it is about being distributed, having low cost, and owning your systems.
Your argument that it is expensive and tedious to maintain compared to AWS S3 is false. No it isn't.
Fear mongering only works against those who haven't built reliable systems. Building an S3 equivalent with cheap providers for redundancy or having one's own small resilient distributed hardware with staffing most often dwarfs the horribly insane premium paid for AWS S3 services.
But this is only if you want the redundancy which is a different topic altogether.
If all you want is a single replica, which was what PunchyHamster originally commented on, the base price of what AWS S3 provides, which does not include redundancy, makes even lesser sense compared to having your own SSD.
Really? No, it's not a few percent.
This is very different from the idea that the savings are a few percent. In almost all cases the savings are nothing or a large fraction.