7 ms·

Well, I guess every company on AWS is screwed, huh?

flukus 8y ago
Eventually yes. Fortunately there is enough demand for actual machines, but if that ever goes away and all of our compute power is owned by a handful of companies then we'll be well on our way to a scary dystopian future. At the moment everyone is trying to do a land grab, but once that phase is over and the market consolidates on 2 or 3 cloud providers and sysadmin skills have disappeared we'll see what a disaster it is.
- bartread 8y ago
  > At the moment everyone is trying to do a land grab, but once that phase is over and the market consolidates on 2 or 3 cloud providers and sysadmin skills have disappeared we'll see what a disaster it is. And if that happens people (I'm looking at YOU, software and devops engineers, with your damned sketchy business cases, desperate to move projects onto AWS mostly so you can bolster your CVs) will only have themselves to blame. Fortunately I suspect there are enough of us jaded and sceptical types around to avoid it.
  - busterarm 8y ago
    Truly competent Ops folks are setting up Terraform/Terragrunt modules for multiple providers and designing with cloud agnosticism in mind. If they aren't, either they're incompetent, the CTO is, or you don't really have a company yet.
    - jjeaff 8y ago
      What part of terraform is cloud agnostic?
      - workinthehead 8y ago
        Uh, the whole thing? Do you need a link to the documentation or something?
        scarface74 8y ago
        I'm as big of a Hashicorp fanboy as you will ever find for on prem implementations -- I've used Consul, Nomad, and Vault. But that's simply not true. Here is an example of a Terraform template straight from their getting started page. https://github.com/terraform-providers/terraform-provider-aws/blob/master/examples/two-tier/main.tf https://github.com/terraform-providers/terraform-provider-aw...
        busterarm 8y ago
        There's nothing preventing you from using other providers as well. You just have to understand how to achieve the same results when you build your modules.
        scarface74 8y ago
        So you have to rewrite your modules for each platform so you're still tying yourself to one vendor and that still doesn't alleviate risks from migration or the large amount of regression testing -- just in case Amazon goes out of business or you can might be able to find an equivalent slightly cheaper? If you are a small company, the difference isn't worth the risk and the expense. If you are a large company you can probable negotiate with Amazon. That doesn't even take into account all of the dependencies that your developers have taken on AWS services....
        jjeaff 8y ago
        So you are saying if I take my AWS infrastructure, which I launch with my terraform config, I can simply use that same config to launch the same infra on GCP or DO? Didn't think so. It's only slightly more agnostic than AWS CloudFormation, in that I can at least use some of the same conventions when I completely rewrite my terraform files. I think you are confusing "agnostic" with "compatible with lots of different providers", but will require a total rewrite if you want to switch providers.
    - akvadrako 8y ago
      That's also what's attractive about Kubernetes - it's nearly a provider-independent cloud API.
    - scarface74 8y ago
      And then you get yet another level of abstraction. It's about like developers who want to wrap all of their data access in a repository pattern just in case they want to change databases. Two things about that -- hardly anyone ever changes infrastructure just to save a little money and their code has to be so generic that they can't take advantage of all of the features of the platform. The chances are far greater that your company will go out of business way before Amazon stops offering AWS. Theory is great that Terraform allows you to seamlessly move infrastructure between cloud providers, but the amount of risk and regression testing it takes to do so would make it a non starter for most companies.
      - busterarm 8y ago
        The idea I'm floating isn't not to use AWS, it's to not be locked into it. Don't use the things that only they offer. This isn't just about cloud provider lock-in, but something you need to do to have a good DR strategy. Back on that Christmas Day that Linode got DDOSed, my company was 100% on their infrastructure. I only had to work a couple of hours that day because I had worked and planned in advance to launch our infrastructure on another host. I saved my company from a multi-million dollar loss that day.
        scarface74 8y ago
        So if you're using AWS and instead of using their services, you're just hosting your own equivalents on EC2 instances, what's the point? The entire reason behind using AWS is the "undifferentiated heavy lifting" - allowing them to take most of the burden off of you except where your company can add value. If all you're doing is hosting a bunch of VPS's, you're really not saving yourself too much over just using a bunch of colocated servers. You can also get much cheaper, less reliable, less geographic diverse hosting somewhere else. But I would have my head handed to me if I even suggested to a company to base their entire infrastructure on Linode instead of AWS, Azure, or even GCP.
        busterarm 8y ago
        There isn't one way or reason to use cloud infrastructure. Maybe for smaller companies the "undifferentiated heavy lifting" narrative makes sense and I've used it as such in the past. Managing tens of millions of dollars in physical and cloud infrastructure at multiple providers/dcs for a publicly traded company like I am now? No, that's not the reason to use cloud infrastructure at all. Cloud in this case is more about capacity planning and avoiding managing hardware inventory than anything.
  - rmc 8y ago
    Employees wouldn't have to keep one eye on their CV and plan for the next job if employers treated employees better and gave them long term security & oppertunities.
  - runlevel1 8y ago
    I think you might be underestimating AWS migrations initiated at the executive level. I dare say the AWS sales pitch is even more effective at that level: "Increase your agility, reduce your operational overhead, scale out with the push of a button. Be like Netflix and Apple." Most executives aren't well-equipped to probe the sharp corners that aren't in the pitch.
- busterarm 8y ago
  Not even eventually. Right now. How many companies out there absolutely depend on all the value add services that AWS provides that are hard to replicate? Does your business depend on Amazon Transcribe (or any other AWS-only service)? Do you have engineers competent to turn around an equivalent product for you in a short release window? No? (Don't lie to yourself. It's no.) Congratulations, you are now Amazon's bitch.
  - noir_lord 8y ago
    Internally we have physical servers, externally we us linode deployed via ansible, we don't rely on any linode specific features (api'snor anything). I (as the sole programmer) made that decision early on. AWS is a none starter because of the gradual vendor lockin (also nature of our business means growth/scalability is very easily predicted).
  - brazzledazzle 8y ago
    I think people will start feeling the pain when Amazon isn’t printing money anymore and starts looking at winding down less popular/profitable services.
- pedalpete 8y ago
  I think we're already there, and it isn't much of a dystopia. There are only 3 big cloud providers, and many major companies rely on them for everything. But their business is built on providing this service. At what point would Amazon, Google or Microsoft say "we don't want that $xB in revenue, just turn it off. NOW! Is that what you're suggesting is the future?
  - walshemj 8y ago
    At that point government would step in and nationalise that part of the company :-) More seriously I can see cloud going the way of telecoms in that there would be a provider of last resort if a telco goes bust another operator takes over to provide service.
  - vkou 8y ago
    The more likely risk is not them turning it off, but increasing prices. Of course, it's a competitive market, so the other two providers would eat their lunch.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
jimbokun 8y ago
My coworker wrote a service that scales extremely well (he pretty much maintains, monitors and operates it by himself, across dozens of servers). He has written multiple deployment options. Kubernetes, Docker swarm, bare VMs, etc. He has tested all of them and written installation tools that can deploy to any of them. For exactly the reason you imply, he doesn't trust any of these options to always be available. I think this mentality has a lot to do with why his service scales so well.
- scarface74 8y ago
  And while he was doing that, how many features could he have added that would increase revenue for the company?
  - mindcrime 8y ago
    And while he was doing that, how many features could he have added that would increase revenue for the company? There's more to building a long-term, sustainable business than optimizing revenue at any cost. And part of that "more" is exactly the work you to do insure against future risks.
    - scarface74 8y ago
      What’s more likely to happen first - Amazon will stop offering an AWS service that you depend on at a price you are willing to pay or that the system you are building will become obsolete and when the time comes to replace it, you can choose different infrastructure? I would even say that your company going out of business is a bigger risk than depending on AWS. The old saying that no one ever got fired for choosing IBM could be applied equally to AWS. The companies that chose IBM in the 70s and 80s can still buy new compatible systems. The companies that chose Stratus or VAX, not so much.
      - neuromantik8086 8y ago
        You're kind of operating on hindsight bias here.
mindcrime 8y ago
Well, I guess every company on AWS is screwed, huh? Screwed? Maybe, maybe not. At risk? Abso-fucking-lutely. There are plenty of stories out there of companies who had their AWS accounts shut-down for some random reason, plenty of stories of AWS outages, etc. Even if Amazon does't pull a "Smyte", there's plenty of risk associated with being on (or "solely on") AWS. By and large, anytime you are completely dependent on someone else's platform, you are increasing risk by putting your destiny in someone else's hands.

Eventually yes. Fortunately there is enough demand for actual machines, but if that ever goes away and all of our compute power is owned by a handful of companies then we'll be well on our way to a scary dystopian future. At the moment everyone is trying to do a land grab, but once that phase is over and the market consolidates on 2 or 3 cloud providers and sysadmin skills have disappeared we'll see what a disaster it is.

bartread 8y ago
> At the moment everyone is trying to do a land grab, but once that phase is over and the market consolidates on 2 or 3 cloud providers and sysadmin skills have disappeared we'll see what a disaster it is. And if that happens people (I'm looking at YOU, software and devops engineers, with your damned sketchy business cases, desperate to move projects onto AWS mostly so you can bolster your CVs) will only have themselves to blame. Fortunately I suspect there are enough of us jaded and sceptical types around to avoid it.
- busterarm 8y ago
  Truly competent Ops folks are setting up Terraform/Terragrunt modules for multiple providers and designing with cloud agnosticism in mind. If they aren't, either they're incompetent, the CTO is, or you don't really have a company yet.
  - jjeaff 8y ago
    What part of terraform is cloud agnostic?
    - workinthehead 8y ago
      Uh, the whole thing? Do you need a link to the documentation or something?
      - scarface74 8y ago
        I'm as big of a Hashicorp fanboy as you will ever find for on prem implementations -- I've used Consul, Nomad, and Vault. But that's simply not true. Here is an example of a Terraform template straight from their getting started page. https://github.com/terraform-providers/terraform-provider-aws/blob/master/examples/two-tier/main.tf https://github.com/terraform-providers/terraform-provider-aw...
        busterarm 8y ago
        There's nothing preventing you from using other providers as well. You just have to understand how to achieve the same results when you build your modules.
        scarface74 8y ago
        So you have to rewrite your modules for each platform so you're still tying yourself to one vendor and that still doesn't alleviate risks from migration or the large amount of regression testing -- just in case Amazon goes out of business or you can might be able to find an equivalent slightly cheaper? If you are a small company, the difference isn't worth the risk and the expense. If you are a large company you can probable negotiate with Amazon. That doesn't even take into account all of the dependencies that your developers have taken on AWS services....
      - jjeaff 8y ago
        So you are saying if I take my AWS infrastructure, which I launch with my terraform config, I can simply use that same config to launch the same infra on GCP or DO? Didn't think so. It's only slightly more agnostic than AWS CloudFormation, in that I can at least use some of the same conventions when I completely rewrite my terraform files. I think you are confusing "agnostic" with "compatible with lots of different providers", but will require a total rewrite if you want to switch providers.
  - akvadrako 8y ago
    That's also what's attractive about Kubernetes - it's nearly a provider-independent cloud API.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    And then you get yet another level of abstraction. It's about like developers who want to wrap all of their data access in a repository pattern just in case they want to change databases. Two things about that -- hardly anyone ever changes infrastructure just to save a little money and their code has to be so generic that they can't take advantage of all of the features of the platform. The chances are far greater that your company will go out of business way before Amazon stops offering AWS. Theory is great that Terraform allows you to seamlessly move infrastructure between cloud providers, but the amount of risk and regression testing it takes to do so would make it a non starter for most companies.
    - busterarm 8y ago
      The idea I'm floating isn't not to use AWS, it's to not be locked into it. Don't use the things that only they offer. This isn't just about cloud provider lock-in, but something you need to do to have a good DR strategy. Back on that Christmas Day that Linode got DDOSed, my company was 100% on their infrastructure. I only had to work a couple of hours that day because I had worked and planned in advance to launch our infrastructure on another host. I saved my company from a multi-million dollar loss that day.
      - scarface74 8y ago
        So if you're using AWS and instead of using their services, you're just hosting your own equivalents on EC2 instances, what's the point? The entire reason behind using AWS is the "undifferentiated heavy lifting" - allowing them to take most of the burden off of you except where your company can add value. If all you're doing is hosting a bunch of VPS's, you're really not saving yourself too much over just using a bunch of colocated servers. You can also get much cheaper, less reliable, less geographic diverse hosting somewhere else. But I would have my head handed to me if I even suggested to a company to base their entire infrastructure on Linode instead of AWS, Azure, or even GCP.
        busterarm 8y ago
        There isn't one way or reason to use cloud infrastructure. Maybe for smaller companies the "undifferentiated heavy lifting" narrative makes sense and I've used it as such in the past. Managing tens of millions of dollars in physical and cloud infrastructure at multiple providers/dcs for a publicly traded company like I am now? No, that's not the reason to use cloud infrastructure at all. Cloud in this case is more about capacity planning and avoiding managing hardware inventory than anything.
- rmc 8y ago
  Employees wouldn't have to keep one eye on their CV and plan for the next job if employers treated employees better and gave them long term security & oppertunities.
- runlevel1 8y ago
  I think you might be underestimating AWS migrations initiated at the executive level. I dare say the AWS sales pitch is even more effective at that level: "Increase your agility, reduce your operational overhead, scale out with the push of a button. Be like Netflix and Apple." Most executives aren't well-equipped to probe the sharp corners that aren't in the pitch.
busterarm 8y ago
Not even eventually. Right now. How many companies out there absolutely depend on all the value add services that AWS provides that are hard to replicate? Does your business depend on Amazon Transcribe (or any other AWS-only service)? Do you have engineers competent to turn around an equivalent product for you in a short release window? No? (Don't lie to yourself. It's no.) Congratulations, you are now Amazon's bitch.
- noir_lord 8y ago
  Internally we have physical servers, externally we us linode deployed via ansible, we don't rely on any linode specific features (api'snor anything). I (as the sole programmer) made that decision early on. AWS is a none starter because of the gradual vendor lockin (also nature of our business means growth/scalability is very easily predicted).
- brazzledazzle 8y ago
  I think people will start feeling the pain when Amazon isn’t printing money anymore and starts looking at winding down less popular/profitable services.
pedalpete 8y ago
I think we're already there, and it isn't much of a dystopia. There are only 3 big cloud providers, and many major companies rely on them for everything. But their business is built on providing this service. At what point would Amazon, Google or Microsoft say "we don't want that $xB in revenue, just turn it off. NOW! Is that what you're suggesting is the future?
- walshemj 8y ago
  At that point government would step in and nationalise that part of the company :-) More seriously I can see cloud going the way of telecoms in that there would be a provider of last resort if a telco goes bust another operator takes over to provide service.
- vkou 8y ago
  The more likely risk is not them turning it off, but increasing prices. Of course, it's a competitive market, so the other two providers would eat their lunch.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

jimbokun 8y ago

My coworker wrote a service that scales extremely well (he pretty much maintains, monitors and operates it by himself, across dozens of servers). He has written multiple deployment options. Kubernetes, Docker swarm, bare VMs, etc. He has tested all of them and written installation tools that can deploy to any of them. For exactly the reason you imply, he doesn't trust any of these options to always be available. I think this mentality has a lot to do with why his service scales so well.

scarface74 8y ago
And while he was doing that, how many features could he have added that would increase revenue for the company?
- mindcrime 8y ago
  And while he was doing that, how many features could he have added that would increase revenue for the company? There's more to building a long-term, sustainable business than optimizing revenue at any cost. And part of that "more" is exactly the work you to do insure against future risks.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    What’s more likely to happen first - Amazon will stop offering an AWS service that you depend on at a price you are willing to pay or that the system you are building will become obsolete and when the time comes to replace it, you can choose different infrastructure? I would even say that your company going out of business is a bigger risk than depending on AWS. The old saying that no one ever got fired for choosing IBM could be applied equally to AWS. The companies that chose IBM in the 70s and 80s can still buy new compatible systems. The companies that chose Stratus or VAX, not so much.
    - neuromantik8086 8y ago
      You're kind of operating on hindsight bias here.

mindcrime 8y ago

Well, I guess every company on AWS is screwed, huh? Screwed? Maybe, maybe not. At risk? Abso-fucking-lutely. There are plenty of stories out there of companies who had their AWS accounts shut-down for some random reason, plenty of stories of AWS outages, etc. Even if Amazon does't pull a "Smyte", there's plenty of risk associated with being on (or "solely on") AWS. By and large, anytime you are completely dependent on someone else's platform, you are increasing risk by putting your destiny in someone else's hands.