We Saved $500k Per Year by Rolling Our Own S3

I'm always amazed by how firms let their AWS expenses get so huge before doing cheaper homegrown solutions.

I wonder if there’s a point at which AWS decides it would be more financially responsible to make lower margins in order to keep more customers.

Just reading the blog post makes me wonder if they really saved 500k. How long did it take them to build the solution, how many people built it, how much does the new service cost while it’s running? How many ops ours does the new service need? The blog goes into many details that I doubt that they built it in less than a month. So maybe they will save money over years but they probably lost money while building the new solution

That was a fun read, great planning, and testing strategy!

It's strange that they didn't try to negotiate lower pricing or just use another storage service.

Or, just have the lambda delete the file or change its storage tier once processing is done.

Or, just use a lambda instead of a proxy.

Or, just use cloudflare.

Many times "why not" is more interesting than "why."