According to Lyft’s recent public filing, they plan to spend 300 million buckaroos in the next 2.5 years on AWS.
Did I hear that right?
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Perhaps that is their estimate, or the maximum amount they want to budget for. Regardless that’s a lot of money any way you slice it. A lot of folks are commenting about how crazy that is, and how much datacenter you could build yourself with that much money.
What do you think? Is it foolhardy? Or is there a hidden wisdom here?
Here’s my take.
1. Do you have one million customers testing your datacenter?
If you’re comparing the cost of the cloud to the raw numbers of running your own datacenter, the hardware costs are not enough. You’ll need to include the ops teams & other engineers. Right, you probably guessed that.
But did you factor in the costs of a legion of testers. This is the hidden cost that commercial software carries, even while open source software gets this benefit for free.
With a public cloud like AWS you have millions of customers testing the product everyday, and running into edge cases long before you do. So you get a better service, that’s more reliable, all invisibly for free.
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2. Do you have 66 datacenters spread across 21 regions and a free network between them?
Anybody who was building web applications in the year 2000 will remember how websites didn’t load the same for different customers. Depending on where in the world they were located, they could experience a very different user experience.
These days we assume that we can be global from day one. But how exactly do we achieve this? Remember with a public cloud, you’re getting tons of things for free, without knowing it. Moving data between AZs or regions? That’s all going across a private interconnect.
And that’s not even including the 180 nodes inside cloudfront that give you a global CDN footprint too!
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3. Do you have an engineering team automating away job roles?
I remember the days of DBA job role, do you? Probably not. I specialized in this for years, and there were tons of companies hiring me to help them with it. First Oracle, then MySQL, then Postgres.
Then along came Amazon RDS. Guess what, companies don’t really hire for that role anymore. They do need help with it from time to time, but not as a primary specialization.
What do I mean? Well by hosting your application on AWS, you’re benefiting from the work of teams of engineers in different departments, all expanding on APIs and automating things that those one million customers are asking for.
You’re not going to be able to innovate that well and that quickly in your own datacenter. So you’ll pay more!
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4. Do you have APIs that tons of engineers have already written code for?
A quick peek at Terraform’s community modules on Github and you’ll probably blush. From VPCs to bastion boxes, key management to load balancers, lots of code has been written and open sourced.
By deploying on a platform that a lot of other devs are using, you’ll benefit from all this open source code. That means you won’t have to write that stuff yourself.
Sure you’ll have integration work to do, but the hidden benefit of being on a popular platform saves you money.
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5. Can you do disaster recovery for free?
If you build your own datacenter, you have to buy all your capacity. So there are no spare servers sitting around waiting for your use. In the public cloud there is always spare capacity.
What that means is you can write automation code to spinup copies of your application stack in alternate regions, at the push of a button. Thus you effectively get disaster recovery for free!
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