5 ms·

They provide many things: - managed systems like s3, dynamodb, etc, which are not trivial to run yourself - on-demand and flexible instance types which allow

They provide many things: - managed systems like s3, dynamodb, etc, which are not trivial to run yourself - on-demand and flexible instance types which allow you to try something without committing - spot instances, autoscaling groups, access to job scheduling like kubernetes. At scale (thousands of nodes) technologies like this are extremely important - redundant and reliable service. It also gives you someone to complain too and blame (they provide slas) - powerful management tooling and APIs that are well documented and widely understood (you can hire an engineer that has used AWS) - security: audit trails, integrated single sign on, private networks, vpns, role based access keys I could keep going. Also keep in mind that reserved pricing (or googles sustained use discount) lowers the cost.

candiodari 9y ago
> managed systems like s3, dynamodb, etc, which are not trivial to run yourself How many organisations need a database to scale like that ? Maybe 1000 worldwide, and at least 900 of them are forbidden by law to run them on clouds (e.g. banks). Also, cloud is essentially outsourcing server management. If you're of a size that needs these sorts of databases, you need a big IT department, cloud or no cloud. At that point, cloud is just vastly more expensive without any monetary advantage. And of course, if you use any of these, the lock in is ridiculous. Also known as "they have you by the b....", and if one thing is damned sure the result will not be saving money, complexity or effort. Or savings of any kind whatsoever. > on-demand and flexible instance types which allow you to try something without committing And ever more management systems that let management "control spending", "control access", ... and so on, designed to prevent that. The problem with the old system was management and processes getting in the way of experimenting, and the only advantage cloud has is that it doesn't have decent support for such processes yet. Every vendor is racing to build them in, and it's getting worse week by week. It won't be long before experimenting is impossible in cloud just like it is in owned datacenter and dedicated setups. The problem with experiments is management in every company I've ever consulted for, and cloud doesn't change a thing, aside from, at the moment, management incompetence getting in the way of their usual sabotage. That will stop once current engineers that know cloud start getting a few promos and is already happening. > spot instances, autoscaling groups, access to job scheduling like kubernetes. At scale (thousands of nodes) technologies like this are extremely important There is no shortage of system supporting this sort of load on dedicated machines, servers, ... > redundant and reliable service. It also gives you someone to complain too and blame (they provide slas) Have you read those slas ? They'll return 10% or so of what you normally pay (not in cash of course, in vouchers) if their service is out for 33% of the time or so. That's not an sla, that's just laughable. If they are out for 5% of the total time, I'd be so pissed I'd start a chargeback. As for redundancy and reliability, there is no shortage of vendors with similar reliability track records, and it is well documented how to make server setups that provide reliability. > powerful management tooling and APIs that are well documented and widely understood (you can hire an engineer that has used AWS) And dedicated servers are linux servers. You can hire engineers, I believe, that have used those. > security: audit trails, integrated single sign on, private networks, vpns, role based access keys Yep, these controls are part of what's preventing that experimenting advantage that currently exists. In reality, all of this relies on well designed policies at the customer side, and I've yet to see that done properly for more than a single team in any company. All of these are of course critically dependent on Google's network, tapped by the NSA as documented in the famous leaked "SSL inserted and removed here" slide, and for numerous privacy breaches, Amazon, famous for "somehow" finding out about how the businesses hosted on their cloud work and taking their customers away (apparently more than 100 court cases against Amazon currently going on), or Microsoft, famous for so many things, including pushing through centralization in Skype for the admitted reason of gaining the ability to spy on their customers. I'm sure their ethics in the cloud hosting department are much better. And please don't even mention those "encrypted storage" assurances. They're not even worth being called bullshit. If I get to write the code that you use to encrypt/decrypt, I can obviously trivially break any key you use. If you don't believe me, I'll give you a webbrowser to download, and I assure you it encrypts all your passwords, then just log into your web banking a few times and see what happens (note: webbrowsers inserting "extra" transactions when doing webbanking are a common thing to find in security work). So secure ... yeah right. Sure, it can work. It won't, of course. > I could keep going. Yeah you could mention that cloud's real advantage is that engineers believe that if they get a web-based non-multiplayer version of minesweeper implemented on kubernetes, they'll get a $200k+ GOOG/FB job. Not true, of course, but nobody wants to tell em that. In fact, implementing a linked list in C on a DOS 1.0 C compiler will help them a LOT more.
- paulie_a 9y ago
  Minor point but aws can be HIPPA complient, if it capable of that, bank software will be perfectly fine for complience. (although incredibly terrible for other reasons but I digress)
  - Johnny555 9y ago
    Indeed, Capital One is already moving to the cloud: https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/capital-one/ https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/capital-one/ https://www.computerworld.com/article/3145622/cloud-computing/capital-one-rides-the-cloud-to-tech-company-transformation.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/3145622/cloud-computin... And they are even investing in cloud companies: https://www.geekwire.com/2017/trying-snowflake-computings-new-product-wall-street-capitalone-invests-company/ https://www.geekwire.com/2017/trying-snowflake-computings-ne...
- kenhwang 9y ago
  For small scale, managed services just makes too much sense. I can have a database with automatic backups, security patching, and failover to another region, within seconds in a click of a button. For less than $1/hr. If you know a sysadmin that can do better for cheaper I'm all ears. The ability to scale to Fortune 100 scale with another click of a button is just a cherry on top. SLAs are nice PR finger pointing tools. No one cares about the pennies you get back. We broke our SLA because Google broke their SLA is a good enough excuse for most of your clients most of the time. Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM still applies. Also, once you're massive sized, at least AWS (though I'm sure GCP/Azure too) seems more than happy to negotiate below their listed pricing, especially for hardware. Security and lock-in are definitely real concerns when considering cloud providers. But let's not pretend cloud providers aren't competitive on price and convenience.
- Johnny555 9y ago
  And of course, if you use any of these, the lock in is ridiculous. Also known as "they have you by the b....", and if one thing is damned sure the result will not be saving money, complexity or effort. Or savings of any kind whatsoever. If you have a simple website and need a key-value store, with a few clicks you can configure a DynamoDB instance -- 50 reads+writes/second will cost around $30/month. Most companies would be hard pressed to set up any open source KV store with 24x7 availability, cross-datacenter replication + backups as well as keeping it patched for less than $360/year. For a small shop without much (or any) operational support, AWS can save money, complexity and effort. For a larger company with significant load, then it may be cheaper to host the services they need themselves, but the scalability of Amazon services means that's purely a financial decision, not a technical decision -- by the time you start to outgrow the capacity of amazon hosted services, you're generally past the point where it's worth it to host your own. And while bare metal may be cheaper, when you own bare metal, you own it 24x7 - you can't scale your infrastructure 3X to handle daytime peak load, or scale it 10X for a day to handle end of quarter processing then scale it back down the next day and stop paying for all of that hardware. Of course, cloud computing is not a panacea and not a perfect fit for all use cases but there are many use cases where it makes sense and can reduce cost and complexity and make it easier to address scalability and redundancy.

candiodari 9y ago

> managed systems like s3, dynamodb, etc, which are not trivial to run yourself How many organisations need a database to scale like that ? Maybe 1000 worldwide, and at least 900 of them are forbidden by law to run them on clouds (e.g. banks). Also, cloud is essentially outsourcing server management. If you're of a size that needs these sorts of databases, you need a big IT department, cloud or no cloud. At that point, cloud is just vastly more expensive without any monetary advantage. And of course, if you use any of these, the lock in is ridiculous. Also known as "they have you by the b....", and if one thing is damned sure the result will not be saving money, complexity or effort. Or savings of any kind whatsoever. > on-demand and flexible instance types which allow you to try something without committing And ever more management systems that let management "control spending", "control access", ... and so on, designed to prevent that. The problem with the old system was management and processes getting in the way of experimenting, and the only advantage cloud has is that it doesn't have decent support for such processes yet. Every vendor is racing to build them in, and it's getting worse week by week. It won't be long before experimenting is impossible in cloud just like it is in owned datacenter and dedicated setups. The problem with experiments is management in every company I've ever consulted for, and cloud doesn't change a thing, aside from, at the moment, management incompetence getting in the way of their usual sabotage. That will stop once current engineers that know cloud start getting a few promos and is already happening. > spot instances, autoscaling groups, access to job scheduling like kubernetes. At scale (thousands of nodes) technologies like this are extremely important There is no shortage of system supporting this sort of load on dedicated machines, servers, ... > redundant and reliable service. It also gives you someone to complain too and blame (they provide slas) Have you read those slas ? They'll return 10% or so of what you normally pay (not in cash of course, in vouchers) if their service is out for 33% of the time or so. That's not an sla, that's just laughable. If they are out for 5% of the total time, I'd be so pissed I'd start a chargeback. As for redundancy and reliability, there is no shortage of vendors with similar reliability track records, and it is well documented how to make server setups that provide reliability. > powerful management tooling and APIs that are well documented and widely understood (you can hire an engineer that has used AWS) And dedicated servers are linux servers. You can hire engineers, I believe, that have used those. > security: audit trails, integrated single sign on, private networks, vpns, role based access keys Yep, these controls are part of what's preventing that experimenting advantage that currently exists. In reality, all of this relies on well designed policies at the customer side, and I've yet to see that done properly for more than a single team in any company. All of these are of course critically dependent on Google's network, tapped by the NSA as documented in the famous leaked "SSL inserted and removed here" slide, and for numerous privacy breaches, Amazon, famous for "somehow" finding out about how the businesses hosted on their cloud work and taking their customers away (apparently more than 100 court cases against Amazon currently going on), or Microsoft, famous for so many things, including pushing through centralization in Skype for the admitted reason of gaining the ability to spy on their customers. I'm sure their ethics in the cloud hosting department are much better. And please don't even mention those "encrypted storage" assurances. They're not even worth being called bullshit. If I get to write the code that you use to encrypt/decrypt, I can obviously trivially break any key you use. If you don't believe me, I'll give you a webbrowser to download, and I assure you it encrypts all your passwords, then just log into your web banking a few times and see what happens (note: webbrowsers inserting "extra" transactions when doing webbanking are a common thing to find in security work). So secure ... yeah right. Sure, it can work. It won't, of course. > I could keep going. Yeah you could mention that cloud's real advantage is that engineers believe that if they get a web-based non-multiplayer version of minesweeper implemented on kubernetes, they'll get a $200k+ GOOG/FB job. Not true, of course, but nobody wants to tell em that. In fact, implementing a linked list in C on a DOS 1.0 C compiler will help them a LOT more.

paulie_a 9y ago
Minor point but aws can be HIPPA complient, if it capable of that, bank software will be perfectly fine for complience. (although incredibly terrible for other reasons but I digress)
- Johnny555 9y ago
  Indeed, Capital One is already moving to the cloud: https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/capital-one/ https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/capital-one/ https://www.computerworld.com/article/3145622/cloud-computing/capital-one-rides-the-cloud-to-tech-company-transformation.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/3145622/cloud-computin... And they are even investing in cloud companies: https://www.geekwire.com/2017/trying-snowflake-computings-new-product-wall-street-capitalone-invests-company/ https://www.geekwire.com/2017/trying-snowflake-computings-ne...
kenhwang 9y ago
For small scale, managed services just makes too much sense. I can have a database with automatic backups, security patching, and failover to another region, within seconds in a click of a button. For less than $1/hr. If you know a sysadmin that can do better for cheaper I'm all ears. The ability to scale to Fortune 100 scale with another click of a button is just a cherry on top. SLAs are nice PR finger pointing tools. No one cares about the pennies you get back. We broke our SLA because Google broke their SLA is a good enough excuse for most of your clients most of the time. Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM still applies. Also, once you're massive sized, at least AWS (though I'm sure GCP/Azure too) seems more than happy to negotiate below their listed pricing, especially for hardware. Security and lock-in are definitely real concerns when considering cloud providers. But let's not pretend cloud providers aren't competitive on price and convenience.
Johnny555 9y ago
And of course, if you use any of these, the lock in is ridiculous. Also known as "they have you by the b....", and if one thing is damned sure the result will not be saving money, complexity or effort. Or savings of any kind whatsoever. If you have a simple website and need a key-value store, with a few clicks you can configure a DynamoDB instance -- 50 reads+writes/second will cost around $30/month. Most companies would be hard pressed to set up any open source KV store with 24x7 availability, cross-datacenter replication + backups as well as keeping it patched for less than $360/year. For a small shop without much (or any) operational support, AWS can save money, complexity and effort. For a larger company with significant load, then it may be cheaper to host the services they need themselves, but the scalability of Amazon services means that's purely a financial decision, not a technical decision -- by the time you start to outgrow the capacity of amazon hosted services, you're generally past the point where it's worth it to host your own. And while bare metal may be cheaper, when you own bare metal, you own it 24x7 - you can't scale your infrastructure 3X to handle daytime peak load, or scale it 10X for a day to handle end of quarter processing then scale it back down the next day and stop paying for all of that hardware. Of course, cloud computing is not a panacea and not a perfect fit for all use cases but there are many use cases where it makes sense and can reduce cost and complexity and make it easier to address scalability and redundancy.