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Comment by bsenftner

11 hours ago

I was a guy that built server clusters during the early 00's, for my own and others' web and other projects. When AWS really took off, it was like a spend all your money mania, and devs and companies treated my skills like dirt. I got a job writing facial recognition edge servers, with high performance many claim are impossible numbers (25M face compares per second per core) and my employer found itself a leader in the industry. But customers could not wrap their heads around just a single box capable of our numbers (800M face compares per second, plus ingestion of 32 video streams) and to get sales the company ended up moving everything into AWS because customers did not trust anything else.

> to get sales the company ended up moving everything into AWS because customers did not trust anything else

This is a hidden cost of self-hosting for many in b2b. It's not just convincing management, it's convincing your clients.

  • That's interesting. Except for $GIGANTIC_CO (like, BofA, or the government), i'd expect a SLA that describes service resiliency and not "well, our service will be up because we're on AWS".

    Why would you need to disclose your hosting provider? is that really a concern for hosted services (and if it is, why isn't the customer hosting it in their cloud?)

    • Most customers do not want to host anything if they can prevent it. My employer was selling the servers that host the entire shebang, and most did not want to host them. We'd explain they'd save a lot by hosting and viewing/streaming everything locally, but their IT people were not comfortable, and their execs wanted to see everything on their phones when not at work. We made it all plug and play, and still they wanted to pay 10-20X more for a web service.