5 ms·

Because the cloud providers advertise to tech startups. They are told that the scalability of the cloud is needed, because YOUR startup can become an overnight

Because the cloud providers advertise to tech startups. They are told that the scalability of the cloud is needed, because YOUR startup can become an overnight success and can’t handle the traffic. This combined with how unsexy most of the VPS or dedicated hosting providers look makes the cloud providers a seemingly good choice for startups.

oblio 7y ago
I'm not sure this is the only reason. Clouds are super, super attractive to stodgy, boring enterprises. And people here working in start up environments are not aware how much hardware from internal IT departments costs. Internal IT departments are generally way less efficient than the cutthroat cloud providers. AWS/Azure/etc. hosting costs are peanuts compared to what most banks or other big enterprises pay for their internal hosting. On top of that, internal IT response times are frequently horrible. Any developer worth his pay generally loves cloud providers and abhors IT departments. They're slow to deploy hardware or VMs, update firewall rules, install software, etc.
- vidarh 7y ago
  The main competition to AWS is not (or should not be) internal IT, but other cloud providers outside the big 2-3 (Digital Ocean etc.), and dedicated and managed hosting providers. I can usually get a server in less than 24h from a provider like Hetzner, but if I need capacity urgently I can also temporarily spin up cloud instances there. The biggest issue is not that people want to avoid internal IT and/or want elasticity, but the number of people who never even do a proper cost comparison beyond the top tier most expensive providers.
  - devonkim 7y ago
    AWS hasn't been selling itself as a competitor to other clouds for like a decade compared to in-house IT because their market entrance _is_ technology lagging companies. The first demo use cases for, say, SQS back to 2008 were literally failing over databases into the cloud. It wasn't really until Azure that any truly serious attempt to compete cloud to cloud at enterprise scale. For all the HN hype of all the various vendors out there, they're all small fries collectively compared to the many billions of the cloud gorillas like Alibaba, Azure, and AWS. DO, Linode, Vultr, etc. are simply not intended for bureaucracy-laden companies that are the lion's share of the global IT market and also are not even allowed under many enterprise vendor and purchasing agreements (had this problem with several customers' contracts / legal before that would have killed 7+ figure deals). Most places outside tech hubs put massive emphasis upon being able to swap labor and are technology laggards because their switching costs are so high due to lack of velocity in their work in technology in the first place (and also why waterfall or spiral makes more sense for their efforts rather than Agile probably even today). The irony here is that strong AWS professionals are not cheap in any way, but neither is being dead in the water because your 60+ year old guru graybeard IT guy that managed the racks faithfully for 12+ years retires suddenly.
    - vidarh 7y ago
      > AWS hasn't been selling itself as a competitor to other clouds for like a decade And yet they're handing out $25k-$100k in credits like candy to startups to prevent them from going to Google cloud or Azure.
      - devonkim 7y ago
        "Selling" is what I was getting at. When looking at the tail end of the funnel every other vendor is giving away drugs to hook kids when they're young. Tail distribution dealers can't afford to do this in contrast. Another tell is that the ways to "prove" start-up status under most of the big providers' terms for cloud credit align more around "did you get VC funding?" than "are you small?" due to the longer lead time nature of bootstrapped start-ups. Most don't give you credits if you've been around 2+ years and soured on another provider. Maybe I just sucked at it but I was bootstrapping before and had trouble getting decent credit then.
- zerg2k 7y ago
  I have strong evidence of the opposite. I worked in a hedge fund (unnamed for privacy) they paid top $ for IT admins, which by the way were very capable. An incursion into AWS taught them a hard lesson - the were nearly 4-5 more efficient than AWS at similar hosting capacity. Moving to GPC was their only option to maintain elasticity at relatively “acceptable” prices.
  - oblio 7y ago
    My "anecdata" is stronger than your "anecdata", I'd say. > they paid top $ for IT admins, which by the way were very capable. Most companies don't pay top dollar and as a result they have to scrape by with the leftovers. As a result Amazon for sure beats them in sysadmining efficiency.
thu2111 7y ago
Also: free cloud credits. Don't underestimate that. I know of two startups (one that I work at). Both are hooked on the cloud, albeit one has an insane cloud bill and one has a very reasonable bill. The reason in both cases is MSFT/AWS gave them massive up front "free" credits, which meant there was no incentive to impose internal controls on usage or put in place a culture of conservation. AWS doesn't think twice before dropping $20k on cloud credits to anyone who wrote a mobile app. At the company with the unreasonable bill, it's not even a SaaS provider. It literally just runs a few very low traffic websites for user manuals, some CI boxes and some marketing sites. The entire thing could be run off three or four dedicated boxes 95% of which would be CI, I'm sure of it. Yet this firm spends several tech salaries worth of money on Azure every quarter. The bill is eyebleeding. The problem is everyone who wanted one got a VM. You got VMs being used for nothing except running a single test program that the owner then forgot about. People used expensive hosted cloud services instead of installing Postgres because "their time is more valuable" etc. Free credits created a culture in which the company just institutionally forgot that servers cost money. When the free credits ran out it was invisible to the engineers using the services and simply became another (opaque) line item for accountants to worry about the burn rate. In the rare cases engineers decided to "optimise" they did it by spending lots of time and effort on using Kubernetes so stuff would scale down at night. There was an abortive attempt to move off the cloud. This was unfortunately stymied by incompetence by both the firm and the chosen hosting provider. It got some boxes from OVH and then didn't pay the bills for them, so the boxes were simply yanked and deleted. All the setup time was lost. In another case OVH allocated machines in datacenters that were far apart but they needed to be close together. In another case the machines were delivered but the hardware on one was faulty. Of course this stuff is a one-time hit and avoidable with non-broken processes, but it empowers those who just want to keep learning Azure/Kubernetes/Docker so they can put it on their CV. The other firm is much smaller and has much more reasonable costs, they also get more for it (e.g. use Heroku which automates a lot of stuff). Having observed these two different companies, I resolved up front that if/when I go back to running my own business I will not use cloud services, even if they offer free credits. I'll be taking pride in finding ways to drive server costs down as far as possible. Perhaps even hosting non-HA-required servers at my home given we have duplex gigabit fiber now. Yes, my time is valuable and all that, but establishing a culture up front in which people use the resources they need and not more is even more valuable.
rumanator 7y ago
> Because the cloud providers advertise to tech startups. That's not true at all. Cloud services are very attractive to good old fashioned companies, because they express the cost of using computational resources as a simple monthly bill, just like any other utility. Your manager goes through the monthly bills and he sees, say, electricity, water, cloud infrastructure, cleaning, office supplies. That's it. No need to know what a server is or what a spot instance is. If the costs fluctuate smoothly and within boundaries then you simply don't worry about them.
- vidarh 7y ago
  > That's not true at all. I have lost count of the number of startups I've evaluated that have gotten $25k-$100k in credits from AWS or Google Cloud, or both. When I was doing consulting I once got paid to first set up an environment on AWS despite them knowing it was too expensive for them, then to migrate from AWS to Google Cloud, then to migrate from Google Cloud to Hetzner - all because my fees for doing the setups and migrations were far lower than the free credits heaped on them by AWS and Google. There are certainly reasons why people in bigger companies like them as well, though from what I see most of the time it is because they can slip the cost under the nose of the manager one level up in a way that is harder to do with more clearly quantified contracts. It's boiling frogs - as long as the cost just slowly creeps up, it doesn't get queried.
  - rumanator 7y ago
    I am a bit skeptical regarding your claims. Without any detail, if you're talking about companies whose business justifies $100k credits from AWS then you're not talking about normal businesses that have at best a local presence. If your company has a global presence then Hetzner doesn't quit cut it, as they only have data centers on Germany and Finland[1] and the added latency of accessing their data centers from non-european space is something that easily adds 100-200ms to each request. Hetzner is indeed excellent if you are a cost-conscious european client that is willing to absorb the cost of self-managed bare-metal or quasi-bare metal servers and cares about saving on bandwidth costs. However, if your goal is to provide a world-wide service then you are compelled to look elsewhere. Even competing european service providers such as OVH[2] or scaleway[3] fare better than Hetzner on this domain. [1] https://www.hetzner.com/unternehmen/rechenzentrum/ https://www.hetzner.com/unternehmen/rechenzentrum/ [2] https://us.ovhcloud.com/about/company/data-centers https://us.ovhcloud.com/about/company/data-centers [3] https://www.scaleway.com/en/datacenter/ https://www.scaleway.com/en/datacenter/
smolder 7y ago
It seems some consulting companies prefer to push AWS over other service providers. AWS has the advantage of a lot of professional certifications and a big catalog of managed services to meet all kinds of needs. Cost is often mostly dev time for a lot of software running on it. It does pretty well at saving developers' time.

oblio 7y ago

I'm not sure this is the only reason. Clouds are super, super attractive to stodgy, boring enterprises. And people here working in start up environments are not aware how much hardware from internal IT departments costs. Internal IT departments are generally way less efficient than the cutthroat cloud providers. AWS/Azure/etc. hosting costs are peanuts compared to what most banks or other big enterprises pay for their internal hosting. On top of that, internal IT response times are frequently horrible. Any developer worth his pay generally loves cloud providers and abhors IT departments. They're slow to deploy hardware or VMs, update firewall rules, install software, etc.

vidarh 7y ago
The main competition to AWS is not (or should not be) internal IT, but other cloud providers outside the big 2-3 (Digital Ocean etc.), and dedicated and managed hosting providers. I can usually get a server in less than 24h from a provider like Hetzner, but if I need capacity urgently I can also temporarily spin up cloud instances there. The biggest issue is not that people want to avoid internal IT and/or want elasticity, but the number of people who never even do a proper cost comparison beyond the top tier most expensive providers.
- devonkim 7y ago
  AWS hasn't been selling itself as a competitor to other clouds for like a decade compared to in-house IT because their market entrance _is_ technology lagging companies. The first demo use cases for, say, SQS back to 2008 were literally failing over databases into the cloud. It wasn't really until Azure that any truly serious attempt to compete cloud to cloud at enterprise scale. For all the HN hype of all the various vendors out there, they're all small fries collectively compared to the many billions of the cloud gorillas like Alibaba, Azure, and AWS. DO, Linode, Vultr, etc. are simply not intended for bureaucracy-laden companies that are the lion's share of the global IT market and also are not even allowed under many enterprise vendor and purchasing agreements (had this problem with several customers' contracts / legal before that would have killed 7+ figure deals). Most places outside tech hubs put massive emphasis upon being able to swap labor and are technology laggards because their switching costs are so high due to lack of velocity in their work in technology in the first place (and also why waterfall or spiral makes more sense for their efforts rather than Agile probably even today). The irony here is that strong AWS professionals are not cheap in any way, but neither is being dead in the water because your 60+ year old guru graybeard IT guy that managed the racks faithfully for 12+ years retires suddenly.
  - vidarh 7y ago
    > AWS hasn't been selling itself as a competitor to other clouds for like a decade And yet they're handing out $25k-$100k in credits like candy to startups to prevent them from going to Google cloud or Azure.
    - devonkim 7y ago
      "Selling" is what I was getting at. When looking at the tail end of the funnel every other vendor is giving away drugs to hook kids when they're young. Tail distribution dealers can't afford to do this in contrast. Another tell is that the ways to "prove" start-up status under most of the big providers' terms for cloud credit align more around "did you get VC funding?" than "are you small?" due to the longer lead time nature of bootstrapped start-ups. Most don't give you credits if you've been around 2+ years and soured on another provider. Maybe I just sucked at it but I was bootstrapping before and had trouble getting decent credit then.
zerg2k 7y ago
I have strong evidence of the opposite. I worked in a hedge fund (unnamed for privacy) they paid top $ for IT admins, which by the way were very capable. An incursion into AWS taught them a hard lesson - the were nearly 4-5 more efficient than AWS at similar hosting capacity. Moving to GPC was their only option to maintain elasticity at relatively “acceptable” prices.
- oblio 7y ago
  My "anecdata" is stronger than your "anecdata", I'd say. > they paid top $ for IT admins, which by the way were very capable. Most companies don't pay top dollar and as a result they have to scrape by with the leftovers. As a result Amazon for sure beats them in sysadmining efficiency.

thu2111 7y ago

Also: free cloud credits. Don't underestimate that. I know of two startups (one that I work at). Both are hooked on the cloud, albeit one has an insane cloud bill and one has a very reasonable bill. The reason in both cases is MSFT/AWS gave them massive up front "free" credits, which meant there was no incentive to impose internal controls on usage or put in place a culture of conservation. AWS doesn't think twice before dropping $20k on cloud credits to anyone who wrote a mobile app. At the company with the unreasonable bill, it's not even a SaaS provider. It literally just runs a few very low traffic websites for user manuals, some CI boxes and some marketing sites. The entire thing could be run off three or four dedicated boxes 95% of which would be CI, I'm sure of it. Yet this firm spends several tech salaries worth of money on Azure every quarter. The bill is eyebleeding. The problem is everyone who wanted one got a VM. You got VMs being used for nothing except running a single test program that the owner then forgot about. People used expensive hosted cloud services instead of installing Postgres because "their time is more valuable" etc. Free credits created a culture in which the company just institutionally forgot that servers cost money. When the free credits ran out it was invisible to the engineers using the services and simply became another (opaque) line item for accountants to worry about the burn rate. In the rare cases engineers decided to "optimise" they did it by spending lots of time and effort on using Kubernetes so stuff would scale down at night. There was an abortive attempt to move off the cloud. This was unfortunately stymied by incompetence by both the firm and the chosen hosting provider. It got some boxes from OVH and then didn't pay the bills for them, so the boxes were simply yanked and deleted. All the setup time was lost. In another case OVH allocated machines in datacenters that were far apart but they needed to be close together. In another case the machines were delivered but the hardware on one was faulty. Of course this stuff is a one-time hit and avoidable with non-broken processes, but it empowers those who just want to keep learning Azure/Kubernetes/Docker so they can put it on their CV. The other firm is much smaller and has much more reasonable costs, they also get more for it (e.g. use Heroku which automates a lot of stuff). Having observed these two different companies, I resolved up front that if/when I go back to running my own business I will not use cloud services, even if they offer free credits. I'll be taking pride in finding ways to drive server costs down as far as possible. Perhaps even hosting non-HA-required servers at my home given we have duplex gigabit fiber now. Yes, my time is valuable and all that, but establishing a culture up front in which people use the resources they need and not more is even more valuable.

rumanator 7y ago

> Because the cloud providers advertise to tech startups. That's not true at all. Cloud services are very attractive to good old fashioned companies, because they express the cost of using computational resources as a simple monthly bill, just like any other utility. Your manager goes through the monthly bills and he sees, say, electricity, water, cloud infrastructure, cleaning, office supplies. That's it. No need to know what a server is or what a spot instance is. If the costs fluctuate smoothly and within boundaries then you simply don't worry about them.

vidarh 7y ago
> That's not true at all. I have lost count of the number of startups I've evaluated that have gotten $25k-$100k in credits from AWS or Google Cloud, or both. When I was doing consulting I once got paid to first set up an environment on AWS despite them knowing it was too expensive for them, then to migrate from AWS to Google Cloud, then to migrate from Google Cloud to Hetzner - all because my fees for doing the setups and migrations were far lower than the free credits heaped on them by AWS and Google. There are certainly reasons why people in bigger companies like them as well, though from what I see most of the time it is because they can slip the cost under the nose of the manager one level up in a way that is harder to do with more clearly quantified contracts. It's boiling frogs - as long as the cost just slowly creeps up, it doesn't get queried.
- rumanator 7y ago
  I am a bit skeptical regarding your claims. Without any detail, if you're talking about companies whose business justifies $100k credits from AWS then you're not talking about normal businesses that have at best a local presence. If your company has a global presence then Hetzner doesn't quit cut it, as they only have data centers on Germany and Finland[1] and the added latency of accessing their data centers from non-european space is something that easily adds 100-200ms to each request. Hetzner is indeed excellent if you are a cost-conscious european client that is willing to absorb the cost of self-managed bare-metal or quasi-bare metal servers and cares about saving on bandwidth costs. However, if your goal is to provide a world-wide service then you are compelled to look elsewhere. Even competing european service providers such as OVH[2] or scaleway[3] fare better than Hetzner on this domain. [1] https://www.hetzner.com/unternehmen/rechenzentrum/ https://www.hetzner.com/unternehmen/rechenzentrum/ [2] https://us.ovhcloud.com/about/company/data-centers https://us.ovhcloud.com/about/company/data-centers [3] https://www.scaleway.com/en/datacenter/ https://www.scaleway.com/en/datacenter/

smolder 7y ago

It seems some consulting companies prefer to push AWS over other service providers. AWS has the advantage of a lot of professional certifications and a big catalog of managed services to meet all kinds of needs. Cost is often mostly dev time for a lot of software running on it. It does pretty well at saving developers' time.