Re: what customers tell us they want
I guess you didn't get the memo - if it's not reliable for you, then you are using it wrong.
Using amazon cloud was the most frustrating and painful part of my career I think. I am happy I haven't had to touch it in several years now.
The company I was at at the time had very high level connections to amazon cloud, I even had a meeting with the chief Andy over there along with his "chief scientist"(forgot the name). Only one meeting though my CTO said I was kind of rude so he didn't want to bring me back. My manager knew I was being polite and holding back a lot though. They basically gave us the same story they had given the company on several previous meetings ("yeah we know, we're trying to fix that.." -- but they never fixed it).
Andy even personally tried to get me fired for writing this blog post years ago:
http://www.techopsguys.com/2010/10/06/amazon-ec2-not-your-fathers-enterprise-cloud/
(my boss at the time read the post and said he had no problem with it. Andy called my CEO, CEO called my CTO, CTO called me I ended up taking the post down for a few years until the company imploded, company was polite enough to threaten me again about the blog post when I left the company eventually)
I loved the look on my boss's face at the time (himself having worked at amazon for about 10 years before) -- the company was spending (on paper, I say on paper because I am not sure how much the company actually paid in money, I think amazon forgave much of the bills due to relationships) roughly $450,000/month hosting shit there. Everyone at the company hated it. So my boss reached out to them (this was back in late 2010) asking if they could come out on site to assist us because clearly we were doing something wrong. Both companies were HQ'd in Seattle, so not like it was far to travel.
They basically told us to fuck off, that was not their model.
I think things have changed since but I mean take pretty much any other big company, HP, IBM, Oracle, MS whomever. If you are spending anywhere remotely resembling that amount they'll fall over backwards to come out on site to help the customer. Amazon didn't give a shit.
The company imploded maybe a year later.
Current company launched in amazon in late 2011 and moved out in 2012, same manager hired me at both companies, I was hired with the intent to move us out. The manager worked hard on cost modeling prior to app launch(he himself had probably 2 and a half years of amazon cloud experience and the ops guy he was working with was similar). Within a week of app launch all of those models were thrown away and costs exploded. By the time we moved out we were up to around $120k/mo spend with them. We've probably grown 8X since that time.
Fortunately the management I've had at current company is cloud aware and I don't have to fight that fight.
As shitty as the last company was, without being there I wouldn't of met the people that landed me at my current gig (in bay area instead of Seattle), where I've had a pretty happy life for the past 5 years at a stable growing company. So the last company did serve some purpose.