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I'm a civil servant, so I look at these questions with a different mindset. I consider adopting a proprietary service to be a decision that entails a fair amoun
by giaour 7y ago
I'm a civil servant, so I look at these questions with a different mindset. I consider adopting a proprietary service to be a decision that entails a fair amount of risk, as I would have no easy recourse should the service become completely unavailable for reasons beyond my organization's control. This could happen for a number of reasons, including the vendor going out of business or raising prices beyond my authority to pay.
I might find that risk acceptable in some cases (e.g., most people who work at my agency use Windows on their workstations, some critical services are still running on z/OS, we use tools like Splunk and New Relic for monitoring), but it might not be worth it in other cases. This would get weighed against other forms of risk (such as the risk that a hand-rolled Cassandra cluster would have less availability than DynamoDB or the risk that you might spend more money than necessary using RDS instead of on-demand DynamoDB).
- scarface74 7y agoLet’s see how much the US government spends on some “proprietary services”.... Oracle: $3 billion. https://federalnewsnetwork.com/reporters-notebook-jason-miller/2016/09/oracle-leave-gsa-schedule-signal-broader-change/ https://federalnewsnetwork.com/reporters-notebook-jason-mill... Microsoft $7.6 Billion https://www.marketwatch.com/story/microsoft-vendors-win-76-billion-government-deal-2019-08-29 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/microsoft-vendors-win-76-b... Both AWS and Azure have separate gov regions. Civil servants have never been adverse to spending money on proprietary solutions.
- giaour 7y agoYes, as mentioned above, we do use proprietary solutions where appropriate. However, all else being equal, I would prefer a managed but replicable service (e.g., MCS or Aurora MySQL) over a purely proprietary one, because deploying a replacement Cassandra or Vitess cluster is usually less costly than rewriting an application to use a different data store.