Businesses Moving From Amazon's Cloud To Build Their Own

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."

Comments

Nor surprising and won't matter.

[serviscope_minor]

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.

Re:Nor surprising and won't matter.

[CastrTroy]

The only case where it really made sense was when you had extremely variable load. It's nice for scientists that need to rent 100 computers for use with one project, but if you're going to be using the same resources on a day-to-day basis, then it makes much more financial sense to just own your own hardware, and rent space in an existing data center. It also makes sense if you use less than a whole server in resources, but VPS was already filling that need quite well before Amazon came along.

Re:Nor surprising and won't matter.

[serviscope_minor]

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.

Re:Nor surprising and won't matter.

[thereitis]

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).

Re:Nor surprising and won't matter.

[Dancindan84]

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.

Re:Nor surprising and won't matter.

[serviscope_minor]

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.

Re:Nor surprising and won't matter.

[hawguy]

neither does amazon unless you pay them a lot more $$$

Depending on your needs, setting up geographical redundancy with Amazon can be extremely cheap -- if you just want a cold or warm site to fail over to, you don't need to keep your entire infrastructure running at the secondary site, just replicate the data, and then spin up the servers over there when you need to fail over.

That's what my company does - we have about a dozen servers to run our website, but the secondary site has only a couple micro instances to receive data. When we need to failover, we just tell one of those servers to wake up the rest of the infrastructure and update the databases from the snapshots that have already been transferred over, including repointing DNS to the backup site. We could make the failover fully automatic, but are afraid of "split brain syndrome" leading to the failover site taking over when the primary is still fine so it's still a manual process. Our backup site is never more than 15 minutes out of date from production.

This has worked well in testing - we've done some "live" late-night failovers and it's relatively seamless -- since it's so cheap to set up the backup site (essentially we just pay for the cost of storage at the backup site), we're going to set up another region overseas for extra redundancy.

Re:Nor surprising and won't matter.

[hawguy]

Depending on your needs, setting up geographical redundancy with Amazon can be extremely cheap

And history has shown that you pay for what you get.

Right, if you cheap out and pay for a single availability zone in a single region, when that AZ or Region goes down, your site is down.

If you pay for multi-AZ and Multi-region deployments you get much better availability.

Just like Amazon says.

Over the past 2 years, Amazon has been more reliable than the coloc we moved away from, mostly due to the triple (!) disk failure that took out our SAN RAID array - one disk failed, and while we were waiting for the replacement, another disk went down, after we replaced those two, another disk went down while rebuilding the RAID-6 array.

With AWS, an entire region can go offline and we can bring up the backup site on the other side of the country (or, starting next month, we could bring up our Ireland region).

All this for less than half the cost we were paying for the coloc + equipment maintenance.

The obvious next step...

[lxs]

...will be to give every user their own personal cloud housed in a box under their desk.
At which point the cycle will begin again.

Re:The obvious next step...

[benf_2004]

...will be to give every user their own personal cloud housed in a box under their desk. At which point the cycle will begin again.

That sounds like a great idea! We can call it a Personal Cloud, or PC for short.

business forecast: cloudy

[OffTheLip]

Businesses don't want to miss the next big thing but like most decisions, time will tell. "I've looked at clouds from both sides now, From up and down, and still somehow It's cloud illusions i recall. I really don't know clouds at all"

Re:business forecast: cloudy

[dkleinsc]

On the upside, it makes it now possible for a business to say "Hey (hey), you (you), get offa my cloud!"

Tightening reins on developers?

[cryfreedomlove]

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.

Different needs for different scales

[slim]

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.

cowboys like you

[onyxruby]

I've reined in cowboys like you for years, from one fortune 500 to another. Arrogant jackasses that can't be bothered with change management, best practices, version control, documentation, pesky things like policies, regulations and laws. Self righteous developers that can't see past their own nose too see how thier actions or inactions affect those around them.

Every single time they think they are above these things and that they know better than the industry around them. They never realize why something that works in their special environment works perfectly fine where they have the rights of a God but has all kinds of mysterious errors in production where there they are brought back down to earth. They then chafe when their development environment is set up identical to production, yet it is amazing how quickly previous mysterious bugs that plagued production and caused incredible operational costs suddenly get fixed. They of course never have to clean up multi-million dollar messes, talk to regulatory agencies, sit down with lawyers to plan how to mitigate their mess or have a face to face with an angry Attorney General.

I've only won this argument and helped companies save millions by reining in the cowboys like yourself a couple dozen times. Probably something to do.with cleaning up large multi-million dollar messes more than once.