Any argument involving price seems to completely ignore TCO. We are using Heroku for most of our needs and suggest it to all our clients and we couldn't be happier to pay the premium over "expensive" AWS. We save a lot on IT and maintenance. Unless you are paying thousands of dollars per month, or your time is very cheap doing your own servers will cost you more.
If AWS were so expensive and "not worth it" what are the guys from Netflix smoking? ;)
"Combined cost for each datacenter is about $1.3M per year." ... "If we spent the $1.3M per year on a complete EC2 site instead, we could afford the following architecture, provided that we used one-year reserved instances." ... "This means that we could add more than 60% capacity our current configuration"
I use AWS extensively, but to be completely fair, Netflix doesn't really care about operations costs. Yes, seriously. Their media licensing is so much more expensive, they do not optimize bang-for-buck, going as far as using larger instances (to avoid noisy neighbor problems) that are much less cost effective.
So while AWS might be completely worth it for some people (it is for us), Netflix isn't the best argument :).
"Netflix doesn't really care about operations costs."
Considering that they're a publicly traded company, they have a fiduciary duty to watch all costs. Though server costs don't compare in relation to media licensing, I'm sure they pay some attention.
That is not how fiduciary duty works. The company's duties require it to make good-faith decisions regarding spending, which can include a good-faith decision that it is not worth their time or energy to chase nickels and dimes.
I stated that a responsable fiduciary monitors where they spend their money. This then allows them to make good-faith decisions. I never said that they're trying to chase nickels and dimes on the ops front.
We do spend thousands a month of hosting. We have servers in 5 geographies...If you include our CDN costs, the amount we spend is quite large. The money we save is enough to get a full time devops and then some.
Netflix probably doesn't pay what you and I pay. Also, for every Netflix, you can find 100 examples that use dedicated or collocated.
> Unless you are paying thousands of dollars per month, or your time is very cheap doing your own servers will cost you more.
This is down to familiarity of tooling, not some intrinsic advantage that EC2 has over managed dedicated hosting. The simple matter is that there just isn't the maturity of tools around automated provisioning of dedicated hosts, which makes them seem higher overhead.
> If AWS were so expensive and "not worth it" what are the guys from Netflix smoking? ;)
Simple: Netflix have very bursty load, so it costs them less to pay the EC2 and virtualisation premium than it would to keep an equivalent amount of dedicated hardware on warm standby. Is your load bursty? Then EC2 might make sense.
EC2 (or any cloud virtualisation platform) will always lose in a shootout with managed dedicated hardware, unless the shootout parameters are provisioning time and tooling, simply because EC2 is managed dedicated hardware plus an extra layer of stuff on top that has to be paid for.
If AWS were so expensive and "not worth it" what are the guys from Netflix smoking? ;)
Also see this AWS cost analysis from TripAdvisor Technical Operations team: http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/10/2/an-epic-tripadviso...
"Combined cost for each datacenter is about $1.3M per year." ... "If we spent the $1.3M per year on a complete EC2 site instead, we could afford the following architecture, provided that we used one-year reserved instances." ... "This means that we could add more than 60% capacity our current configuration"