Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?
We are a 1000-2000 person company and we have probably on the order of $100M of servers and data centers and whatnot, and I think we spend about 2&#x2F;3rds of that every year on power&#x2F;maintenance&#x2F;rent&#x2F;upgrades&#x2F;etc.<p>We don&#x27;t generally trust cloud providers to meet our requirements for:<p>* uptime (network and machine - both because we are good at reliability [and we&#x27;re willing to spend extra on it] and because we have lots of fancy redundant infrastructure that we can&#x27;t rely on from cloud companies)<p>* latency (this is a big one)<p>* security, to some degree<p>* if something crazy is happening, that&#x27;s when we need hardware, and that&#x27;s when hardware is hard to get. Consider how Azure was running out of space during the last few months. It would have cost us an insane amount of money if we couldn&#x27;t grow our data centers during Corona! We probably have at least 20-30% free hot capacity in our datacenters, so we can grow quickly.<p>We also have a number of machines with specs that would be hard to get e.g. on AWS.<p>We have some machines on external cloud services, but probably less than 1% of our deployed boxes.<p>We move a <i>lot</i> of bandwidth internally (tens of terabytes a day at least, hundreds some days), and I&#x27;m not sure we could do that cheaply on AWS (maybe you could).<p>We do use &lt;insert big cloud provider&gt; for backup, but that&#x27;s the only thing we&#x27;ve thought it was economical to really use them for.