9 ms·

I'm starting to suspect that the major cloud vendors are well along on pulling a classic "embrace, extend, extinguish" gambit on that front. I'm sure there are

I'm starting to suspect that the major cloud vendors are well along on pulling a classic "embrace, extend, extinguish" gambit on that front. I'm sure there are a percentage of people operating in the cloud who stick judiciously to an open-source stack, and remain masters of their own future as a result. But it seems more common to spread some open source icing on top of a cake made out of ingredients like Beanstalk, Redshift, S3, Lambda, etc. (Or name your favorite non-Amazon cloud vendor's equivalent.) Those companies may be just as locked into their closed-source software vendor of choice as people were locked into Microsoft or IBM or whoever back in the 1990s.

throwaway2048 8y ago
The lock in is far more complete than it ever was in the Microsoft era, with Microsoft of the 90s, you could mostly still choose to just stop buying their crap, and stick with what you had while you migrate, or work out an alternative. The minute you stop paying a cloud vendor, your entire infrastructure vanishes in a cloud of smoke, and if you relied on their "value add" proprietary services, you are left with basically nothing, not even the ability to run your own code, or in some cases even your data.
- anon1m0us 8y ago
  schadenfreude for all! Everyone hated Microsoft for selling software. Everyone hated Microsoft for requiring the world value software monetarily. The world thought programmers were just a bunch of nerds to be taken advantage of. Microsoft said no. The nerds hated microsoft for making them pay for an operating system. The nerds got their way. They got free everything. And now the OSS worls is a convoluted mess. It costs way more to make Ruby on Rails work than just installing IIS and writing some C#. Now those who said Microsoft was bullying them are the bullies. OSS has become more expensive than the Microsoft equivalent. No one wants to pay for code at all anymore. Why couldn't you all see this coming? It was so obvious.
  - anon1m0us 8y ago
    What? You downvote because it wasn't obvious to you?
    - coldtea 8y ago
      No, because it's random and mostly wrong ramblings. > Everyone hated Microsoft for selling software. Not really. They hated it for abusing their monopoly, and for selling a crappy (at the time at least) desktop OS. > Everyone hated Microsoft for requiring the world value software monetarily. Not really. Some believed software must be free as in beer and speech, most didn't care. They certainly didn't hate MS for it. >The nerds hated microsoft for making them pay for an operating system. Not really. They hated MS for monopoly abuse, a bad OS, too many viruses and security holes, few ways to look under the hood, and fucking forever with IE 6. >The nerds got their way. They got free everything. They just got the server. And a lot of the enterprise server is still MS. The desktop is still 90% MS and 10% macOS (with some insignificant Linux percentage). As for mobile it's 40% iOS and 60% Android, which technically it's still OSS, but not in any sense that matters besides the license (nobody cares much, and it's not developed by some community bazaar style, Google calls all the shots, and the good stuff -google apps- are not Open Source). >And now the OSS worlds is a convoluted mess. Not really. >It costs way more to make Ruby on Rails work than just installing IIS and writing some C#. Yeah, no. If anything RoR is famous for its ease of development. And it costs nothing (besides programmers, which you need in any case), which is why cash-strapped startups prefer RoR and other FOSS solutions over MS. >Now those who said Microsoft was bullying them are the bullies. Non sequitur. >OSS has become more expensive than the Microsoft equivalent. Non sequitur. OSS is as free as ever (and better than ever). >No one wants to pay for code at all anymore. Less want to pay for code, though billions still buy software and pay for services.
      - lowercased 8y ago
        > OSS has become more expensive than the Microsoft equivalent. I watched an MS-supporter at a MS 'dev camp' day conference give a lecture on web hosting. His position - restated multiple times - was that hosting with IIS was cheaper than with Apache/Linux, but hosting companies were in cahoots to artificially inflate the cost of IIS hosting, because it let them justify paying linux admins more. Something about you could programmatically script IIS much faster/easier than Linux, and it was cheaper to integrate with Active Directory, but hosting companies wanted to make MS look bad so they charged more (and made a bigger profit) on MS hosting. Honestly, even typing it out doesn't make much sense. I tried to get him to clarify the position some at the time (this was... probably 2010-2012 time frame) and... I got some nonsense answer. It was truly nonsensical. But he was passionate. I half-expected the word 'illuminati' to pop up in his presentation. Linux/Apache is "more expensive" for hosting, but companies charge more for Windows because the Linux people at those companies want to drive people away from Microsoft. I think that was the gist of it...
- specialist 8y ago
  Chewing on your observation... During the 90s, the big lock-in strategy was thru proprietary file formats. With cloud, exfiltrating one's own data can get real spendy real quick. But it seems the lock-in is the fit & finish of one's production env. K8s was the new religion at my last gig. But interop & migrating between on-prem, AWS, Google wasn't easy. All the fiddly bits, like managing VPCs, creds and certs, load balancing tweaks, autoscaling rules, backups, ad nauseam. Maybe things have gotten easier. Maybe we were doing it wrong. (I'm certain that I had no idea what I was doing.) But I couldn't shake the feeling our effort to leave AWS (if we wanted) was gonna fail.
setquk 8y ago
Totally agree. I keep crowing IaaS only but everyone has their fingers in their ears going lalalalala. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s just not my funeral now.
anth_anm 8y ago
Embrace, Extend, Engulf? I'm not sure what you call it when Amazon can pretty much just take your project over when you piss them off. Mongo is getting EEE'ed.
- Guthur 8y ago
  Imo mongo tried to change the rules of the game to be in their favor and AWS reacted in their best long term interests. And whether or not you like it that's fair, AWS were not in breach of the original software contract.
  - isostatic 8y ago
    Microsoft were never in breach of anything legally. If they'd have had their way we'd still be on IE6.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - gnomewascool 8y ago
      Agreed that something being legal doesn't make it right, but some of Microsoft's behaviour was illegally monopolistic.
  - linkregister 8y ago
    Oh well, if it's legal I guess it's ok. Why debate or discuss anything? The case is closed everybody, it's legal!
    - egypturnash 8y ago
      Heavens forbid morals should enter into the discussion. All laws are perfectly rational and sensible and none of them have ever been put into place at the behest of major corporations with a lot of money to throw into buying politicians.
eeZah7Ux 8y ago
In the 1980s the lock-in was in hardware: you buy this server, you get our OS and software stack. In the 90s and 2010s it was software: you buy this software because others are not compatible with it. Today's lock-in is cloud services. Will people ever learn?
- jrockway 8y ago
  Is it, though? I feel like the nuts and bolts of cloud services are super commoditized and I can pick up and leave whenever I want. Kubernetes on Amazon (where I am) is going to be close enough to Kubernetes on GCP, and even close enough to just buying some servers and running Kubernetes myself. I don't know all the details of how I will do load balancing when doing it myself, but I work at an ISP and I'm sure the network engineers will help with that. Overall, I'm super non-worried about cloud providers. They're like credit cards, when someone offers you more cash back or more miles or whatever, you just switch to them and don't even think about it. (Why do I even use Amazon? Sheer laziness. Having servers in my own datacenters would probably be much cheaper, but I honestly just want to program and not randomly take a week to install some critical patch to MetalLB, or upgrade the Linux kernel, or find that the Intel EM2384732FOO NICs I got have some bug where they drop every 9878th TCP session.)
  - sien 8y ago
    Exactly. A world where front ends are deployed on a CDN and the back ends are all containers is very commodity driven. Also infrastructure being set up with code on platforms that target multiple providers like Terraform provides more ability to move systems. It'll be really interesting to see if AWS can keep their margins in such a world. Given that MS make huge amounts of money from email and have virtual lock in on corporate email it's very possible, but on the other hand perhaps it won't happen if everyone is, as they tend to be, using open frameworks and generally open systems.
  - kelnos 8y ago
    That's only true if you limit yourself to the base infra offerings, or offerings that have direct mostly-compatible alternatives elsewhere. If I use DynamoDB, I'm stuck with AWS, absent an expensive, difficult migration. Even with Kubernetes, moving from EKS to your own cluster means spinning up your own k8s masters, which might not be in $RANDOM_DEVELOPER's wheelhouse. And IIRC AWS has their own special things for doing ingress that you'd need to change as well. Even just going from EC2 to Google's analog might mean rewriting private tooling that specifically uses AWS APIs.

throwaway2048 8y ago

The lock in is far more complete than it ever was in the Microsoft era, with Microsoft of the 90s, you could mostly still choose to just stop buying their crap, and stick with what you had while you migrate, or work out an alternative. The minute you stop paying a cloud vendor, your entire infrastructure vanishes in a cloud of smoke, and if you relied on their "value add" proprietary services, you are left with basically nothing, not even the ability to run your own code, or in some cases even your data.

anon1m0us 8y ago
schadenfreude for all! Everyone hated Microsoft for selling software. Everyone hated Microsoft for requiring the world value software monetarily. The world thought programmers were just a bunch of nerds to be taken advantage of. Microsoft said no. The nerds hated microsoft for making them pay for an operating system. The nerds got their way. They got free everything. And now the OSS worls is a convoluted mess. It costs way more to make Ruby on Rails work than just installing IIS and writing some C#. Now those who said Microsoft was bullying them are the bullies. OSS has become more expensive than the Microsoft equivalent. No one wants to pay for code at all anymore. Why couldn't you all see this coming? It was so obvious.
- anon1m0us 8y ago
  What? You downvote because it wasn't obvious to you?
  - coldtea 8y ago
    No, because it's random and mostly wrong ramblings. > Everyone hated Microsoft for selling software. Not really. They hated it for abusing their monopoly, and for selling a crappy (at the time at least) desktop OS. > Everyone hated Microsoft for requiring the world value software monetarily. Not really. Some believed software must be free as in beer and speech, most didn't care. They certainly didn't hate MS for it. >The nerds hated microsoft for making them pay for an operating system. Not really. They hated MS for monopoly abuse, a bad OS, too many viruses and security holes, few ways to look under the hood, and fucking forever with IE 6. >The nerds got their way. They got free everything. They just got the server. And a lot of the enterprise server is still MS. The desktop is still 90% MS and 10% macOS (with some insignificant Linux percentage). As for mobile it's 40% iOS and 60% Android, which technically it's still OSS, but not in any sense that matters besides the license (nobody cares much, and it's not developed by some community bazaar style, Google calls all the shots, and the good stuff -google apps- are not Open Source). >And now the OSS worlds is a convoluted mess. Not really. >It costs way more to make Ruby on Rails work than just installing IIS and writing some C#. Yeah, no. If anything RoR is famous for its ease of development. And it costs nothing (besides programmers, which you need in any case), which is why cash-strapped startups prefer RoR and other FOSS solutions over MS. >Now those who said Microsoft was bullying them are the bullies. Non sequitur. >OSS has become more expensive than the Microsoft equivalent. Non sequitur. OSS is as free as ever (and better than ever). >No one wants to pay for code at all anymore. Less want to pay for code, though billions still buy software and pay for services.
    - lowercased 8y ago
      > OSS has become more expensive than the Microsoft equivalent. I watched an MS-supporter at a MS 'dev camp' day conference give a lecture on web hosting. His position - restated multiple times - was that hosting with IIS was cheaper than with Apache/Linux, but hosting companies were in cahoots to artificially inflate the cost of IIS hosting, because it let them justify paying linux admins more. Something about you could programmatically script IIS much faster/easier than Linux, and it was cheaper to integrate with Active Directory, but hosting companies wanted to make MS look bad so they charged more (and made a bigger profit) on MS hosting. Honestly, even typing it out doesn't make much sense. I tried to get him to clarify the position some at the time (this was... probably 2010-2012 time frame) and... I got some nonsense answer. It was truly nonsensical. But he was passionate. I half-expected the word 'illuminati' to pop up in his presentation. Linux/Apache is "more expensive" for hosting, but companies charge more for Windows because the Linux people at those companies want to drive people away from Microsoft. I think that was the gist of it...
specialist 8y ago
Chewing on your observation... During the 90s, the big lock-in strategy was thru proprietary file formats. With cloud, exfiltrating one's own data can get real spendy real quick. But it seems the lock-in is the fit & finish of one's production env. K8s was the new religion at my last gig. But interop & migrating between on-prem, AWS, Google wasn't easy. All the fiddly bits, like managing VPCs, creds and certs, load balancing tweaks, autoscaling rules, backups, ad nauseam. Maybe things have gotten easier. Maybe we were doing it wrong. (I'm certain that I had no idea what I was doing.) But I couldn't shake the feeling our effort to leave AWS (if we wanted) was gonna fail.

setquk 8y ago

Totally agree. I keep crowing IaaS only but everyone has their fingers in their ears going lalalalala. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s just not my funeral now.

anth_anm 8y ago

Embrace, Extend, Engulf? I'm not sure what you call it when Amazon can pretty much just take your project over when you piss them off. Mongo is getting EEE'ed.

Guthur 8y ago
Imo mongo tried to change the rules of the game to be in their favor and AWS reacted in their best long term interests. And whether or not you like it that's fair, AWS were not in breach of the original software contract.
- isostatic 8y ago
  Microsoft were never in breach of anything legally. If they'd have had their way we'd still be on IE6.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - gnomewascool 8y ago
    Agreed that something being legal doesn't make it right, but some of Microsoft's behaviour was illegally monopolistic.
- linkregister 8y ago
  Oh well, if it's legal I guess it's ok. Why debate or discuss anything? The case is closed everybody, it's legal!
  - egypturnash 8y ago
    Heavens forbid morals should enter into the discussion. All laws are perfectly rational and sensible and none of them have ever been put into place at the behest of major corporations with a lot of money to throw into buying politicians.

eeZah7Ux 8y ago

In the 1980s the lock-in was in hardware: you buy this server, you get our OS and software stack. In the 90s and 2010s it was software: you buy this software because others are not compatible with it. Today's lock-in is cloud services. Will people ever learn?

jrockway 8y ago
Is it, though? I feel like the nuts and bolts of cloud services are super commoditized and I can pick up and leave whenever I want. Kubernetes on Amazon (where I am) is going to be close enough to Kubernetes on GCP, and even close enough to just buying some servers and running Kubernetes myself. I don't know all the details of how I will do load balancing when doing it myself, but I work at an ISP and I'm sure the network engineers will help with that. Overall, I'm super non-worried about cloud providers. They're like credit cards, when someone offers you more cash back or more miles or whatever, you just switch to them and don't even think about it. (Why do I even use Amazon? Sheer laziness. Having servers in my own datacenters would probably be much cheaper, but I honestly just want to program and not randomly take a week to install some critical patch to MetalLB, or upgrade the Linux kernel, or find that the Intel EM2384732FOO NICs I got have some bug where they drop every 9878th TCP session.)
- sien 8y ago
  Exactly. A world where front ends are deployed on a CDN and the back ends are all containers is very commodity driven. Also infrastructure being set up with code on platforms that target multiple providers like Terraform provides more ability to move systems. It'll be really interesting to see if AWS can keep their margins in such a world. Given that MS make huge amounts of money from email and have virtual lock in on corporate email it's very possible, but on the other hand perhaps it won't happen if everyone is, as they tend to be, using open frameworks and generally open systems.
- kelnos 8y ago
  That's only true if you limit yourself to the base infra offerings, or offerings that have direct mostly-compatible alternatives elsewhere. If I use DynamoDB, I'm stuck with AWS, absent an expensive, difficult migration. Even with Kubernetes, moving from EKS to your own cluster means spinning up your own k8s masters, which might not be in $RANDOM_DEVELOPER's wheelhouse. And IIRC AWS has their own special things for doing ingress that you'd need to change as well. Even just going from EC2 to Google's analog might mean rewriting private tooling that specifically uses AWS APIs.