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Comment by bob1029 | Hacker News Reader

Not enough humans to deal with physical machines and the compliance issues around them.

I agree if we are operating a cat meme distribution business that AWS starts to look a bit overkill. Something like a banking consultancy is a different matter. Good luck passing due diligence as a bank's vendor when you are also physically responsible for the machines. You can do this, but it sucks and it's your entire job + overtime + on call.

AWS has a dedicated feature (artifact) that can serve as the foundation of your compliance package. If you are racking your own machines you get to start with a blank pile of forms.

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> I agree if we are operating a cat meme distribution business that AWS starts to look a bit overkill. Something like a banking consultancy is a different matter.

I think it's the other way around. At the extreme scales you don't want AWS.

If you're running a cat meme distribution business, a single senior skilled techie will cheaply get you set up on a VPS (or a bunch of them) with the services you need.

If you're a bank, you have all the budget in-house to babysit your own VPS and stand up your own equivalents to whatever the fuck it is you were using on AWS, and follow all regulations. Because, face it, as a bank, the type of regulations you meet by using AWS is a tiny fraction of all the regulations you have to follow, so there is literally a team within the bank tasked purely with making sure all banking regulations are followed, and that team exists even if you're on AWS for everything.

The only place AWS makes sense is if you're a company with no technical department in the first place.

But AWS is a VPS company. Who's managing those VPSes?

> But AWS is a VPS company. Who's managing those VPSes?

The same people who were logging into AWS and managing stuff there.

... Yes, the people who manage AWS are the people who manage AWS. But which people are they?

Sure, of you are a one-man shop trying to sell IT services in a regulated category to banks, hosting is not something you want to add to your list of problems.

This is not comparable to the situation in a company like Airbus, with perhaps 10k people of every imaginable expertise employed in just the IT department. Not comparable to most companies that are 1/50th of Airbus size either.

For a largish company (1000+ people, 500M+ turnover), assigning ten FTE:s to managing the racks and general core infra on a 365/24 basis and another five lawyers and general bureaucrats to deal with the general paperwork is nothing.

The reason for the big cloud shift in the 2010s was other things. A lot of hype/lies about how fast, cheap and easy things would be. And in many companies probably also a feeling that internal IT were a bunch of morons who failed at anything you asked them to do, and that anything else must be better.

Genuine question: is using AWS for compliance any better or worse than using Delve for compliance?

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