At my work there was a big push to get things out of our own isolated data centers and into AWS because we had some services that were really very vulnerable and not equipped to serve a global distributed audience well. AWS solved that problem for us and our devs liked working with it. However now our AWS bill is so high that we’re pushing everyone to reduce it. I guess that makes sense. We’re not going back to self-hosting, just optimizing and reducing. But it sure feels like whiplash from “get everything into AWS” to “we have too much in AWS.”
I don’t know if it costs far more but AWS is one big bill whereas running your own systems is a bunch of smaller expenses including real estate and employees in addition to hardware and utilities costs, insurance, etc which are harder to count. We see AWS on one big bill so the sticker shock is more palpable.
Moving to AWS didn’t just replace our services, it gave us a higher level of service reliability and availability. We would have had to double our spend to serve the globe as we really need to. AWS was the better option.
I think it costs a ridiculous amount because we moved over services that were built on self-run data centers where chron jobs were not billed on CPU cycles in a transparent way. Now they are. We can probably cut the AWS bill by as much as half through intelligent refactoring and optimization. Smarter data retention periods, killing off shit that isn’t worth it etc.
It’s almost as if centralizing everything is fucking stupid.
At my work there was a big push to get things out of our own isolated data centers and into AWS because we had some services that were really very vulnerable and not equipped to serve a global distributed audience well. AWS solved that problem for us and our devs liked working with it. However now our AWS bill is so high that we’re pushing everyone to reduce it. I guess that makes sense. We’re not going back to self-hosting, just optimizing and reducing. But it sure feels like whiplash from “get everything into AWS” to “we have too much in AWS.”
So it sounds like rather than investing in your own systems you outsourced and now it costs far more.
Shit son that’s the same as almost every industry.
I don’t know if it costs far more but AWS is one big bill whereas running your own systems is a bunch of smaller expenses including real estate and employees in addition to hardware and utilities costs, insurance, etc which are harder to count. We see AWS on one big bill so the sticker shock is more palpable.
Moving to AWS didn’t just replace our services, it gave us a higher level of service reliability and availability. We would have had to double our spend to serve the globe as we really need to. AWS was the better option.
I think it costs a ridiculous amount because we moved over services that were built on self-run data centers where chron jobs were not billed on CPU cycles in a transparent way. Now they are. We can probably cut the AWS bill by as much as half through intelligent refactoring and optimization. Smarter data retention periods, killing off shit that isn’t worth it etc.
But the bean counters said it was the best idea!
Accountants shouldn’t be allowed to make decisions beyond their personal lives. MBAs even more so