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> Why use AWS at all if you’re not using their managed services? Is this a serious question? I can value the infrastructure the AWS provides, such as regions a

> Why use AWS at all if you’re not using their managed services? Is this a serious question? I can value the infrastructure the AWS provides, such as regions and availability zones, while not wanting to get tied into their other services including the managed services for reasons such as business requirements for cloud agnosticism, which is for example one reason I tend to use HAproxy instead of ELB even on stuff on AWS. With CI/CD pipelines applied to infrastructure and a move towards no-ops, the maintenance costs of self-managed infra is reducing more and more. I understand for some shops with a lack of personnel or knowledge to accomplish that self management may want to buy into a holisitic solution, but I think it's awfully intellectually disingenuous to not recognize the potential value of not buying into a holistic solution in certain situations. Also, common, 'cloud specific'? So if I want to spin up my stack on Google or some other platform, I just have to rewrite a few lines of some .tf files. If I want to do that and I'm tied to CloudFormation.... I'm sol...

scarface74 7y ago
Really? You would go as far as managing your own load balancers instead of using a managed, highly available ELB from AWS? Have you tried using Terraform across providers? It’s far more than just “a few lines of codes”. If you just want cross region availability and still manage things yourself, there are much cheaper ways than AWS.
- arminiusreturns 7y ago
  Yes I would, there are some cases where the featureset is better. Also, it really is just a few lines of code. If you separate out IAC-code and configuration code even if you are running through say a jenkins pipeline it's not much trouble to change a few .tf files around to get the same result on a different provider... You act like writing terraform is hard or convoluted and I don't understand where you are coming from on that. https://github.com/terraform-providers https://github.com/terraform-providers
  - toiletduck 7y ago
    Writing Terraform is easy - having it work after six month of features being delivered, the cloud provider evolving, and working with all your other microservices, isn't particularly. Assuming you can do that and just change a few lines to redeploy in a new cloud environment (imagine that including GKE to EKS) seems naive.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      On another note, in the list of top ten things that will add business value and either make the company money or save the company money where does “being cloud agnostic rate”? What competent CTO would go through a migration from one provider to another on a whim? The chance of regression and business interruption is too high and the benefits too low to make it worth it if you’re at any type of scale.
      - solidasparagus 7y ago
        At a certain scale, being cloud agnostic is actually very financially beneficial. The negotiating leverage leads to substantially better private pricing deals with your cloud provider.
        scarface74 7y ago
        At a certain scale are you really going to move your entire infrastructure over to another provider? The time, migration cost, and business risks are usually not worth it. The time you’re spending migrating, testing, validating for correctness and often compliance is time you’re not spending on creating business value. On top of that, you’ve migrated all of the practices from being at a colo without any of the time to market , lower headcount, and flexibility or availability that you get from using native cloud services. You’re investing time and not taking into account any of the opportunity cost. Businesses are so dependent on vendors these days - from payroll, to Office Suites, to database vendors, to even their physical facilities it’s silly to optimize for one part of your infrastructure at the expense of other opportunities in the rare case that you might change vendors. Do you also have a migration plan for all of your other dependencies? Are all of your documents in an open source format? What about your project management system? Your AD? Your device management system? Are all your desktops running Linux? Are you using Microsoft Exchange? What are you using for time tracking? Expense reimbursement? SSO? Alerting and monitoring?

scarface74 7y ago

Really? You would go as far as managing your own load balancers instead of using a managed, highly available ELB from AWS? Have you tried using Terraform across providers? It’s far more than just “a few lines of codes”. If you just want cross region availability and still manage things yourself, there are much cheaper ways than AWS.

arminiusreturns 7y ago
Yes I would, there are some cases where the featureset is better. Also, it really is just a few lines of code. If you separate out IAC-code and configuration code even if you are running through say a jenkins pipeline it's not much trouble to change a few .tf files around to get the same result on a different provider... You act like writing terraform is hard or convoluted and I don't understand where you are coming from on that. https://github.com/terraform-providers https://github.com/terraform-providers
- toiletduck 7y ago
  Writing Terraform is easy - having it work after six month of features being delivered, the cloud provider evolving, and working with all your other microservices, isn't particularly. Assuming you can do that and just change a few lines to redeploy in a new cloud environment (imagine that including GKE to EKS) seems naive.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    On another note, in the list of top ten things that will add business value and either make the company money or save the company money where does “being cloud agnostic rate”? What competent CTO would go through a migration from one provider to another on a whim? The chance of regression and business interruption is too high and the benefits too low to make it worth it if you’re at any type of scale.
    - solidasparagus 7y ago
      At a certain scale, being cloud agnostic is actually very financially beneficial. The negotiating leverage leads to substantially better private pricing deals with your cloud provider.
      - scarface74 7y ago
        At a certain scale are you really going to move your entire infrastructure over to another provider? The time, migration cost, and business risks are usually not worth it. The time you’re spending migrating, testing, validating for correctness and often compliance is time you’re not spending on creating business value. On top of that, you’ve migrated all of the practices from being at a colo without any of the time to market , lower headcount, and flexibility or availability that you get from using native cloud services. You’re investing time and not taking into account any of the opportunity cost. Businesses are so dependent on vendors these days - from payroll, to Office Suites, to database vendors, to even their physical facilities it’s silly to optimize for one part of your infrastructure at the expense of other opportunities in the rare case that you might change vendors. Do you also have a migration plan for all of your other dependencies? Are all of your documents in an open source format? What about your project management system? Your AD? Your device management system? Are all your desktops running Linux? Are you using Microsoft Exchange? What are you using for time tracking? Expense reimbursement? SSO? Alerting and monitoring?