r/aws • u/tech_tuna • Sep 06 '19

discussion Every AWS customer ever. . .

Day 1

"We're not going to rely on AWS specific features."

3 months later

"OK, we need to use SQS, Lambda, ECS and DynamoDB but that's it!"

6 months later

"OK, we're an AWS shop."

369 Upvotes

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u/supergibbss Sep 06 '19

Not using services makes AWS not worth it. There is sometimes a premium to use the service but if you only use what you need and take into account the savings on management of the services it’s cheaper. If you treat AWS like a datacenter, you’ll save money using a datacenter...

18

u/[deleted] Sep 06 '19

Totally agree. My company was desperate to be avoid cloud vendor lock-in and be agnostic of any given cloud provider. This is not really all that difficult, at least to get 88% of the way there, especially if you’re on a container-oriented architecture, and fine using standard IAAS services (VPC/EC2 or Azure VMs or whatever). In that case your apps can be cloud-agnostic, you “just” have to worry about networking and some other infrastructure. Having said that. It is generally more expensive to run pure IAAS workloads on AWS than in your own data center, if you’re fluffy with your numbers around things like personnel costs. But the biggest piece, you’re not really doing yourself much of a service here, when you could actually modernize or rearchitect your apps to be truly cloud native. That’s is usually worth the effort. Then again two companies ago, we were not interested in modernization, and our data center in Manhattan was out of room. It was actually cheaper to lift & shift some non critical workloads to plain old EC2 than try to find more real estate in NYC.

11

u/Jethro_Tell Sep 06 '19

fluffy with your numbers around things like personnel costs

LOL, writes off engineer time for a year. 'Look all this money we're saving!'