We Saved $500k per Year by Rolling Our Own S3

(engineering.nanit.com)

11 points | by Bogdanp 11 hours ago

4 comments

  • merb 16 minutes ago
    Just reading the blog post makes me wonder if they really saved 500k. How long did it take them to build the solution, how many people built it, how much does the new service cost while it’s running? How many ops ours does the new service need? The blog goes into many details that I doubt that they built it in less than a month. So maybe they will save money over years but they probably lost money while building the new solution
  • mannyv 2 hours ago
    It's strange that they didn't try to negotiate lower pricing or just use another storage service.

    Or, just have the lambda delete the file or change its storage tier once processing is done.

    Or, just use a lambda instead of a proxy.

    Or, just use cloudflare.

    Many times "why not" is more interesting than "why."

  • gigatree 3 hours ago
    I wonder if there’s a point at which AWS decides it would be more financially responsible to make lower margins in order to keep more customers.
    • LeFantome 2 hours ago
      Sure. But that point is probably not when they have 40% of the public cloud market.
  • sema4hacker 10 hours ago
    I'm always amazed by how firms let their AWS expenses get so huge before doing cheaper homegrown solutions.
    • ronbenton 3 hours ago
      $500K is like 1 or 2 fully loaded engineer salaries in the US. It’s not all that expensive.
    • RandomException 8 hours ago
      They usually don't make sense optimizing before achieving these levels of expenses. I mean, for a really long time the expenses are so low that it would cost more to engineer these solutions in the first place, and then they suddenly run through the roof exponentially.

      But mainly, priorities and "it's not that much in comparison to all else". And perhaps not even tracking the costs properly :)

      • BobbyTables2 5 hours ago
        I see the practical angle but I still don’t get why companies are so happy to park their private internal data in S3.

        They have that much faith that the world’s biggest target will never be hacked nor hire a dishonest admin?

        • beached_whale 3 hours ago
          It doesn't feel unlikely they would be ordered by a government to share data too.