Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

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>In 200X lots of companies were able to maintain their own infrastructure, just like Facebook and Amazon did at the time.

But my point is that companies' IT departments did not maintain infrastructure just like Amazon did.

In ~2005 when companies were first experimenting with AWS cloud, they might start with dev & test servers. They click a few buttons and are amazed when new servers get spun up in minutes and their programmers are productive immediately. The natural question that company execs ask is, "why can't our own internal IT department spin up servers for us in 10 minutes?!? Why does it take them so damn long?!?"

They wouldn't have asked those hard questions if their internal IT capability was equivalent to AWS. Eventually, their improved experiences with AWS on Dev&Test&QA convinced them to migrate mission-critical Production workloads to AWS as well.

>We have cheaper hardware. We have (supposedly) better software.

You're still focusing on on hardware+software and not considering the IT employees' speed of execution in how company executives compare the situation.

Even Netflix as a tech company maintained their own datacenters for over 10 years but ended up migrating to AWS. Their "Guardian" moment was a big database corruption in 2008. They also had ambitious plans to expand into countries outside of USA. Those were some of the factors that convinced them they didn't want to invest anymore in their own datacenters and preferred AWS take care of it. Amazon employees iterated on datacenter capabilities faster than Netflix engineers could do it.

netflix does not depend on aws to deliver their video bits. they do it themselves based on a big network of core and edge pni and caches. this infra, that netflix has built, in datacenters, is a big competitive advantage. it would be worse performance and much higher cost to do this over something like aws cloudfront.

>this infra, that netflix has built, in datacenters,

Unless things have changed since 2015, reports say Netflix eliminated their last datacenter already.[1]

The Netflix "edge appliances" for CDN streaming are located in others' datacenters owned by Verizon,Comcast,ISPs,etc.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/netfl...

That's still in datacenters that aren't Amazon's, Google's, etc. It's the most critical component of netflix (the actual video delivery) and it's not "in the cloud".

>That's still in datacenters

The point isn't that they are still _in_ datacenters. Yes, of course, they are. Even the "cloud" ultimately resolves down to somebody's datacenter somewhere. The point is that Reed Hastings & Netflix wanted to get out of managing their own datacenters.

Putting their Netflix appliances inside of ISP owned datacenters still lets them avoid managing their own datacenters. Their critical user accounts signup, monthly billing, and analytics, etc workloads are at AWS. And as the article mentions, even updating the cache on the Netflix appliances is coordinated through AWS. The combination of those strategies keeps them out of the "datacenter business" and let's them stay focused on their core competency of "video content".

Netflix employees still walk inside those datacenters.

I’ve avoided my own datacenter by using Equinix, for example. I wouldn’t call that “cloud” though.

The distinction makes important fault domains and whose data centers.

If you are a Comcast customer and your internet goes down, and Netflix is unavailable, who do you complain at? If you're smart enough to notice that both are down, the answer is almost certainly not Netflix. That does not make the Netflix workloads in Comcast data center any less critical, they are core business functions. But they are well aligned with Comcast, who also depends on the proper functioning of those datacenters.

It makes sense for Netflix appliances to be in Comcast datacenters then, especially given that Comcast cannot outsource their data centers any more than the Pentagon can reasonably do so.

Joe Company from off the street can outsource their data centers and derives no competitive advantage from maintaining their own private data centers. Netflix in that sense is closer to Joe Company than they are to Comcast, I guess. I'm not sure what all we can learn from this, but it's interesting.

The 'web' and browsing part is on AWS, the CDN is their own not on AWS.

The Netflix example is a poor one. They have a friggin fleet of CDN-boxes around the world that are as locally close as possible to eye-balls. To say they are "100%" on AWS is disingenuous - they still have their own hardware deployed all around the world - just closer to the edge.

AWS is used for control-plane / management-plane tasking - but the bits are pushed from locally-peered CDN boxes at all kinds of ISPs.

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