Amazon 'sucks the air out of the room.' That room is now your server room

http://www.elctech.com/articles/aws-sucks-the-air-out-of-the-room-cuts-ec2-costs-by-50

by usiegj00 • 17 years ago

33 8 17 years ago

elctech.com

patrickg-zill2• 17 years ago

Not going to happen. Ever.

Reason? You need to be in control of your key assets.

For a non-critical website or a web service, I can see AWS taking over for some or all parts.

For something handling financial transactions, or for anything of a high value, no.

Consider a scheduling application for a company with 200 well-paid people. How much would loss of that scheduling application for the 1 hour that it is really needed per day (to set up schedules) cost?

mhb• 17 years ago

You need to be in control of your key assets.

Why is this any different than water or electricity for which most businesses are satisfied with central providers?

patrickg-zill2• 17 years ago

I would point out that hospitals, large financial sites, corporate headquarters etc. have backup generators for electricity and usually at least 1 water tank to ensure a supply of water.

pretz• 17 years ago

For a non-critical website or a web service, I can see AWS taking over for some or all parts.

For something handling financial transactions, or for anything of a high value, no.

I think there are a lot of sites out there that not having to administer their own machines is worth the minor loss of control. Sure, there will always be sites that need that control, but for many web apps (etc) out there, I think AWS will be worth the tradeoffs.

TomOfTTB• 17 years ago

The problem is you aren't thinking the thing all the way through.

The question that follows is "Why do you need to control your asseets?"

The answer being "So you can ensure they don't go down"

Then the question becomes "can you use cloud computing and be sure your server won't go down?"

The answer "Yes, you just have to have redundancy (the kind you'd get by having a second provider like Rackspace host a redundant fail-safe server)"

So really "control" doesn't matter because thinking the train of thought all the way through leads you right back to the central theme of the article: Cost

If Amazon + some kind of redundancy is still cheaper for your company than cloud computing might be for you.

njharman• 17 years ago

Is bandwidth a key asset? Do you control your connection once it leaves your building? All the routers and networks between you and your customer? What about DNS? How much control do you believe you exert over the root name servers? What happens when your servers fail? Do you have in house electrical engineers and chip designers so you are in control of your key assets?

You wildly overblow the need for control and wildly undervalue the amount of control you have over a 3rd party vendor.

> How much would loss of that scheduling application for the 1 hour that it is really needed per day (to set up schedules) cost?

Weigh that against the cost of duplicating what amazon has + staffing + recruitment + retention of staff + building for them and their managers to work in + all the other costs. For a huge number of companies the cost/risk of AWS or the like is gonna be better than cost/risk of doing it themselves.

chris11• 17 years ago

IT seems to be moving to making basic services commodities.

Financial services are already being handled by contractors for many small businesses. The requirements to legally handle credit card info can be expensive, so small websites just contract it out.

And unless you need some specific networking solution, like if you're running an mmorpg or using the network to trade stocks, outside services will probably meet your needs.

So your IT department running your server is basically an insurance policy against downtime. And once web hosting turns into a commodity, you'll probably be able spend less on insuring against downtime using outside services.. I'm sure you could spread your hosting out between several hosts for less than running your server.

jasonkester• 17 years ago

Ugh. There is no 50% price cut. The author just misread the "Reserved Instances" post on the AWS blog.

Too bad. I actually had my hopes up for a minute there. Then somebody asked for an official statement and the author referenced that blog entry, which only deals with 24/7 instances, and even then wouldn't be a 50% saving unless you committed to a 3 year contract.

So yeah, nothing to see here.

Amazon 'sucks the air out of the room.' That room is now your server room

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