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Businesses Moving From Amazon's Cloud To Build Their Own

Posted by samzenpus on from the on-my-own dept.

itwbennett writes "There are rumblings around this week's OpenStack conference that companies are moving away from AWS, ready to ditch their training wheels and build their own private clouds. Inbound marketing services company HubSpot is the latest to announce that it's shifting workloads off AWS, citing problems with 'zombie servers,' unused servers that the company was paying for. Others that are leaving point to 'business issues,' like tightening the reins on developers who turned to the cloud without permission."

8 of 121 comments (clear)

  1. Nor surprising and won't matter. by serviscope_minor · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It doesn't surprise me and I don't think it will matter much.

    Amazon is not particularly cheap. If you host your own, even with power, cooling and hardware, the payback time is about 4 to 6 months.

    If you have a lot of load then it is going to be cheaper to host it yourself, so it's worth doing for big companies.

    With Amazon of course you can start as a one man band and still have potential to grow without it getting painful from an administrative point of view.

    --
    SJW n. One who posts facts.
    1. Re:Nor surprising and won't matter. by serviscope_minor · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The only case where it really made sense was when you had extremely variable load.

      Indeed, or if you're expecting to scale. The thing is, as you scale up, you can always move the baseload to dedicated servers and just do the variable part on Amazon.

      --
      SJW n. One who posts facts.
    2. Re:Nor surprising and won't matter. by thereitis · · Score: 4, Insightful

      If you're just using Amazon for compute power then perhaps, but then you've got no geographic redundancy with that single data center. Whether it's worth rolling your own solution really depends on your needs (lead time, uptime requirements, budget, IT skill/availability, etc).

    3. Re:Nor surprising and won't matter. by Dancindan84 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The thing is, when a company reaches a certain size they likely have a enough computer infrastructure to have an IT department anyway, even if they aren't an IT company. With your example of Ford, they have offices for managers, sales etc. All of those people likely have desktop computers, so they likely have dedicated desktop support. Additionally they probably have some kind of centralized authentication like active directory, which means they'll need a server and some sort of sys admin/IT infrastructure already. They likely wouldn't be adding an IT division in order to host their own email, they'd be adding an email server/management to the load of the existing IT department, which is obviously not as big an upfront overhead cost, making it more attractive.

      --
      "Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
    4. Re:Nor surprising and won't matter. by serviscope_minor · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Take for instance a large company like Ford (picked because they aren't a computer/technology/web based, but large company). Their expertise has nothing to do with computers.

      Are you sure about that?

      A large company must have many many areas of expertise. Obviously their goal is to make cars. But have expertise in cars, large scale manugacturing, logistics, marketing, engineering, anything required to support engineering including simulation running on supercomputers, human resources and probably a whole bunch I haven't thought of.

      The point is that many of them will involve computers to a large degree, so although a company like Ford makes no money with computers per-se every area of their operation will involve computer systems. As a result they will have a huge amount of computer expertise.

      --
      SJW n. One who posts facts.
  2. Tightening reins on developers? by cryfreedomlove · · Score: 4, Insightful

    From this article: "like tightening the reins on developers who turned to the cloud without permission"

    Let me state this in other words: "Insecure IT guys are afraid for their own jobs if they can't lord it over developers". Seriously, developers working in an API driven cloud just don't need a classic IT organization around to manage servers for them. Cloud is a disruptive threat to classic IT orgs.

    1. Re:Tightening reins on developers? by SimplyGeek · · Score: 3, Insightful

      That's not always the case. Look at workplaces that fall under HIPAA regulations. That last thing IT wants is for developers to start up their own app projects in the cloud, whereby their apps start accessing PHI/PII. The moment that PHI goes from the local intranet and those bits go onto a 3rd party cloud service, the company will shit a brick because the developer's just violated regulations. There's a reason IT and security requires oversite of app development.

  3. Different needs for different scales by slim · · Score: 5, Insightful

    How hard is it to understand that the cost/benefit depends on your size?

    Car analogy: If you're an individual who needs a car a couple of times a year, you rent one on those occasions. If you drive almost every day, you buy a car and you get it insured. If you're a small company, you give your travelling staff a car allowance. If you're a big company, you buy a company car scheme and insure all the cars under one policy. If you're a gigantic company, you self-insure all your staff's company cars.

    Draw a graph of the cost vs scale of a third-party cloud, versus your own datacentre. At some point the graphs will cross. That's where you switch.