The people that I know that work(ed) at Netflix say they should bring it back in house. My understanding was that Reed+team got snookered by IBM and said 'never again.' To wit, look at their CDN initiative, that's not outsourced to AWS.
Agreed that case-by-case makes sense, but we're pattern matchers, and we should group those cases into situational models.
1/ Adrian C. rocks. I had his sun performance book back in the 90s and think it and he is great.
2/ the "should being it back in house" is to save money. They love the abstraction and the in-house methodology and tools; but recognize that they're paying more to AWS than it would cost them to do it.
but recognize that they're paying more to AWS than it would cost them to do it.
Adrian C came to a different conclusion.[1] He said it was cheaper to iterate & fail on AWS than on their own hardware. It was cheaper to expand into foreign markets by using AWS datacenters already there. It was cheaper to do large-scale fallback and disaster recovery with AWS.
I don't know who you talked to at Netflix but in my experience, there's an interesting division of opinion on whether AWS makes financial sense. In general, the tech team (admins, etc) think the in-house team can do it cheaper. But the business execs running the numbers in Excel see that AWS makes more sense. First the company tries things out with sandbox, dev, and qa on AWS and they get seduced by the speed and flexibility. (Why are we paying the IT team that takes 5 days to provision a dev box for the programmers?!?!) The business execs see possible value in moving more critical production workloads to AWS. The IT team that tries to keep it in-house can't show a convincing spreadsheet that calculates bare metal+staff is cheaper.
Most businesses' internal devops team (including the world-class one at Netflix) cannot match the pace of accumulating infrastructure expertise at AWS. This shouldn't surprise us since most businesses don't consider the babysitting of rack servers to be their core competency. I'm not convinced that Reed Hasting's internal team could execute faster and innovate cheaper than amazon's team. Sure, Netflix internal bare-metal servers will perform better than EC2 instances but there's also a speed to staff execution. Being slower on the admin tasks can negate the savings on the raw cpu hardware.
Comments
The people that I know that work(ed) at Netflix say they should bring it back in house. My understanding was that Reed+team got snookered by IBM and said 'never again.' To wit, look at their CDN initiative, that's not outsourced to AWS.
Agreed that case-by-case makes sense, but we're pattern matchers, and we should group those cases into situational models.
1/ Adrian C. rocks. I had his sun performance book back in the 90s and think it and he is great.
2/ the "should being it back in house" is to save money. They love the abstraction and the in-house methodology and tools; but recognize that they're paying more to AWS than it would cost them to do it.
Adrian C came to a different conclusion.[1] He said it was cheaper to iterate & fail on AWS than on their own hardware. It was cheaper to expand into foreign markets by using AWS datacenters already there. It was cheaper to do large-scale fallback and disaster recovery with AWS.
I don't know who you talked to at Netflix but in my experience, there's an interesting division of opinion on whether AWS makes financial sense. In general, the tech team (admins, etc) think the in-house team can do it cheaper. But the business execs running the numbers in Excel see that AWS makes more sense. First the company tries things out with sandbox, dev, and qa on AWS and they get seduced by the speed and flexibility. (Why are we paying the IT team that takes 5 days to provision a dev box for the programmers?!?!) The business execs see possible value in moving more critical production workloads to AWS. The IT team that tries to keep it in-house can't show a convincing spreadsheet that calculates bare metal+staff is cheaper.
Most businesses' internal devops team (including the world-class one at Netflix) cannot match the pace of accumulating infrastructure expertise at AWS. This shouldn't surprise us since most businesses don't consider the babysitting of rack servers to be their core competency. I'm not convinced that Reed Hasting's internal team could execute faster and innovate cheaper than amazon's team. Sure, Netflix internal bare-metal servers will perform better than EC2 instances but there's also a speed to staff execution. Being slower on the admin tasks can negate the savings on the raw cpu hardware.
[1]http://www.informationweek.com/cloud/infrastructure-as-a-ser...