I’ve been working with amazon aws and I’m confused how amazon can possibly have enough hardware to handle all it’s customers and users. I was reading one of the benefits of cloud storage is that there’s no hardware maintenance for the user and no need to upgrade every X amount of years. Wouldn’t amazon run into the same issue? Wouldn’t they need to update their hardware every X years and wouldn’t it cost millions of dollars?
In: Technology
Amazon can afford it because of their scale. Amazon gets massive discounts on everything HDD CPU’s ect because they don’t order 100 HDD they order 100,000,000. Also look at the costs of S3. S3 is 0.023 GB a month. Lets assume Amazon used WD Gold 14TB HDDs. You can pick one up for about 460$ I’m not sure what Amazon pays bout I would say 400$ is totally reasonable it’s probably even lower. Including raid 6 on a 8 disk array lets you use 75% of the disk or 10.5TB. At the s3 rate this is 241$ a month. The WD Gold has a 5 year warranty so assuming it dies at exactly 5 years Amazon can make 14,490$ on a disk that cost them 400$. That is a profit of 234$ a month, for every HDD! This doesn’t even count your read wright costs.
This is where scale comes in. The other costs like the data centers and IT people can be spread out over all the Amazon cloud products so that maybe only 10 or 12 dollars of that HDD profit are spent on IT people and another 8-10 are spent on the data center it’s self.
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