We had to do all of this too for which servers to buy. We ended up going with SUN hardware, though x86 not Sparc, because we wouldn't have people nearby the sites and they had an excellent reputation for reliability. Also Mads, one of our sysadmins, had a thumb on the scale.
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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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