Before we could build any sites, we needed to get colo space. We didn't have a lot of time for negotiating and getting through vendors, so we focused on vendors that could sign one contract that covered many sites. So folks like Level3 and Equinix.
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I set up similar sites in New York, Los Angeles, and other places I've forgotten. Driving a van in Manhattan was fun! Not. Oh and Level3 left the combination lock codes inside the cages! I had to jimmy my camera in under the door one time, take a photo of the codes, then unlock.
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We could drop-ship supplies to the nearest CDW, things like screws and cables. Everyone knows US and EU have different power standards, but did you know that they have completely different cage-nut types? Things you learn!
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Our site in Luxembourg was one of our biggest, for advantageous tax reasons. I was even asked to trombone our Dutch office internet via the Luxembourg site so we could geo-ip as there. Oh and it was in an old unused telco switch room below a Pizzeria.https://www.flickr.com/photos/colmmacc/albums/72157594430427394 …
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Building our own transcoding facility was even more epic. Trucks and trucks of gear. Took about a year to build out ... and we were a 2 year old startup!https://www.flickr.com/photos/colmmacc/408009341/in/album-72157594565858594/ …
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It was around this time that EC2 first launched, and literally the day it went public, I asked our CTO if we could just use it instead. I worked out the numbers, and even at EC2's day one prices (which would now seem exorbitant) ... the time savings seemed worth it.
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The transcoding stuff I thought EC2 was perfect for, but I was told we couldn't use EC2 for some hand-waving reasons to do with MPAA security requirements. Sadness.
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The summer after we built all this, I interviewed at AWS. I interviewed at Amazon in Dublin, and I told every interviewer I only wanted to work on AWS. Turns out AWS was building a CDN, but couldn't tell me, and it'd be a good fit.
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I remember telling one of my interviewers (Doug) that the kind of stuff I was doing now was dumb-ass and that AWS would make it history, and that I wanted to be on the right side of that. He was more modest ... that AWS/Cloud could carve out a niche.
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There's a long way to go still, plenty of workloads yet to move. This thread isn't a victory lap for Cloud/EC2. But good god is it hard to imagine a startup in 2019 repeating what we did in 2007/2008. It would be *insane*.
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The entire capacity we built out, which was certainly 10s of people years of effort; lawyers, admins, sysadmins, developers, flights, drives, etc ... I can spin that up in seconds using EC2. Seconds. In more locations! Cheaper!
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That truck worth of servers that took months of negotiation and logistics? Trucks like that pull up to AWS every day! You can even order a SnowMobile truck of ours to pull up to your own site and then come to us. It's mind-blowing.
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One of my favorite parts of my job is that I go to SFBA every month or two and talk with several startup customers. It's so fun to meet people who don't know any other way; who never had to do it the burdensome way. That is very very satisfying! /End-of-thread or AMA.
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