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These requirements basically entail that you're able to achieve feature parity with an on-premises datacenter; thus, you're treating various cloud providers as

These requirements basically entail that you're able to achieve feature parity with an on-premises datacenter; thus, you're treating various cloud providers as vendors for VMs, storage, and network. "Treating the cloud like it's a datacenter" isn't exactly a best practice from a pure architectural perspective. That said, there may well be business constraints forcing the decision, and that's fine--I'm not trying to pass judgement any! My point is simply that by building something that can be deployed to any and all environments you're reducing the list of what can be used down to a very small set of primitives.

JackRabbitSlim 7y ago
Not "Best Practice" according to whom? Cloud vendors selling lock-in services? From an architectural perspective how is a bare VM at a remote data center worse than indeterminate/unknown intermedate layers of a proper "cloud" provider that is still in the same remote data center with the same hops and latency? That "very small set of primitives" is enough to build the cloud vendors themselves so how exactly is that a limiting factor? If I seem overtly hostile I don't mean it that way. I am just genuinely curious for an extended explanation. In it's current form it sounds down right marketing tautology to my ears.
- QuinnyPig 7y ago
  For a lot of workloads, higher level services offer more bang for buck along the axes that matter. For a small real world example, I could run Wordpress myself on a VM for a fraction of what I pay WPengine, but it's way better for everyone if I pay WPengine instead and get on with doing the things that move the needle on my business. Scaled up, you can consider the equivalent to be using managed database offerings, message queues, load balancers, etc. There's more value to me in spending time on the differentiated things that drive the value I provide to my customers than me implementing a crappy shadow of DynamoDB or BigQuery myself.
carnitas 7y ago
Thats a great point. I guess I want the product to be deployed anywhere so containers are my first thought

JackRabbitSlim 7y ago

Not "Best Practice" according to whom? Cloud vendors selling lock-in services? From an architectural perspective how is a bare VM at a remote data center worse than indeterminate/unknown intermedate layers of a proper "cloud" provider that is still in the same remote data center with the same hops and latency? That "very small set of primitives" is enough to build the cloud vendors themselves so how exactly is that a limiting factor? If I seem overtly hostile I don't mean it that way. I am just genuinely curious for an extended explanation. In it's current form it sounds down right marketing tautology to my ears.

QuinnyPig 7y ago
For a lot of workloads, higher level services offer more bang for buck along the axes that matter. For a small real world example, I could run Wordpress myself on a VM for a fraction of what I pay WPengine, but it's way better for everyone if I pay WPengine instead and get on with doing the things that move the needle on my business. Scaled up, you can consider the equivalent to be using managed database offerings, message queues, load balancers, etc. There's more value to me in spending time on the differentiated things that drive the value I provide to my customers than me implementing a crappy shadow of DynamoDB or BigQuery myself.

carnitas 7y ago

Thats a great point. I guess I want the product to be deployed anywhere so containers are my first thought