5 ms·

> At a past job, we hired some people out of Amazon to work on our cloud services. They rewrote large portions of it using AWS serverless tools. I think they p

by ris 6y ago

> At a past job, we hired some people out of Amazon to work on our cloud services. They rewrote large portions of it using AWS serverless tools. I think they probably considered you a "sucker". Think you're ever going to be able to migrate that app to anything other than AWS?

PragmaticPulp 6y ago
> Think you're ever going to be able to migrate that app to anything other than AWS? Obviously, no, we did not expect to migrate our AWS Serverless backend to something other than AWS. Avoiding vendor lock in makes sense in few, select circumstances. Avoiding vendor lock in for the sake of avoid vendor lock in leads to over engineered services that take longer to deliver because people are going out of their way to avoid using vendor-specific tools. In all of my time as an engineering manager, the number of times that avoiding vendor lock in has solved more problems than it caused is still zero. Use the best tools available at your disposal to get the job done. Cross the vendor-changing bridge if (and only if) it becomes a requirement.
- momokoko 6y ago
  I think you might be thinking it is a binary choice. Educated decisions can be made to decide if a particular item is worth the lock in or not. For example auto scaling groups in AWS are much faster to set up and maintain than vendor neutral choices. But leaving asg is pretty much the same amount of work as setting up auto scaling anyway. Switching out has cost but not that much. Something like cognito... that’s almost impossible to leave. But more importantly it’s the AWS “glue” between these services that is truly impossible to leave. I have seen two businesses fail under the weight of AWS billing and be unable to get out from underneath it before they ran out of funding. It’s definitely not something to look at lightly.
  - scarface74 6y ago
    And how many companies are successful either because they started on AWS until they found product market fit and they were capitalized well enough to migrate off (Dropbox) or are successfully running their entire business at scale on AWS (Netflix). How many companies fail because they run out funding - period?
    - ris 6y ago
      > And how many companies Congratulations, you found two examples out of the millions of companies that exist in this world, both with astronomically greater funding and scale than anyone you or I are likely to work on. Yet people continue to obsess about these unicorns and assume the choices they've had to make are clearly the right choices for everyone. The greatest problem with modern devops is peoples delusional ideas over the scale upon which they're really operating and where they're really going to start feeling the pinch. I've come across way too many tinpot "we're netflix!" setups that crumble under their own unmanageability as soon as they have budget and staff taken away from them for a couple of quarters.
      - scarface74 6y ago
        So you are claiming that there are only two companies that have successfully run a business on AWS? The reason for managed cloud is the same reason for using any other vendor. To let you focus on your core competencies that give you a competitive advantage. Do you also think companies shouldn’t use Github, Microsoft, Workday, Oracle, SalesForce, Atlassian, etc.? Do you know how much infrastructure you can buy for the fully allocated code of one employee? Maybe they know something that you don’t know... Seeing that even Amazon admits that only 5% of Enterprise workloads are on any cloud provider, who is arguing that it is always the right choice? I command a higher than (local) market salary for an individual contributor in no small part because of my expertise when it comes to AWS, but I’m the first person to tell someone who asks me for advice when it doesn’t make sense to bother with the complexity and cost of a cloud provider and just use a colo, VPS, or just use AWS Lightsail (AWS’s answer to companies like Linode).
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
        momokoko 6y ago
        > Do you know how much infrastructure you can buy for the fully allocated code of one employee? $10k does not get you very far with AWS.
- ris 6y ago
  > In all of my time as an engineering manager, the number of times that avoiding vendor lock in has solved more problems than it caused is still zero. How long have you stuck around to find out? Never had to undertake a massive task to migrate an existing system that's closely bound to its legacy platform? Because that's the other side of the coin. I also highly suspect that number is not zero, you're just not counting the obvious decisions people make every day that avoid lock-in because they seem like common sense. But I suspect you're not building everything using ColdFusion, though, or doing your version control through Perforce... > Use the best tools available at your disposal to get the job done. Behind this phrase lies the fallacy that there is any such thing as "the best tool" and the implication that anyone doing anything different is a clear idiot. In reality, everyone uses "the best tool", it's just they have different metrics by which they measure it.

by ris 6y ago

PragmaticPulp 6y ago

> Think you're ever going to be able to migrate that app to anything other than AWS? Obviously, no, we did not expect to migrate our AWS Serverless backend to something other than AWS. Avoiding vendor lock in makes sense in few, select circumstances. Avoiding vendor lock in for the sake of avoid vendor lock in leads to over engineered services that take longer to deliver because people are going out of their way to avoid using vendor-specific tools. In all of my time as an engineering manager, the number of times that avoiding vendor lock in has solved more problems than it caused is still zero. Use the best tools available at your disposal to get the job done. Cross the vendor-changing bridge if (and only if) it becomes a requirement.

momokoko 6y ago
I think you might be thinking it is a binary choice. Educated decisions can be made to decide if a particular item is worth the lock in or not. For example auto scaling groups in AWS are much faster to set up and maintain than vendor neutral choices. But leaving asg is pretty much the same amount of work as setting up auto scaling anyway. Switching out has cost but not that much. Something like cognito... that’s almost impossible to leave. But more importantly it’s the AWS “glue” between these services that is truly impossible to leave. I have seen two businesses fail under the weight of AWS billing and be unable to get out from underneath it before they ran out of funding. It’s definitely not something to look at lightly.
- scarface74 6y ago
  And how many companies are successful either because they started on AWS until they found product market fit and they were capitalized well enough to migrate off (Dropbox) or are successfully running their entire business at scale on AWS (Netflix). How many companies fail because they run out funding - period?
  - ris 6y ago
    > And how many companies Congratulations, you found two examples out of the millions of companies that exist in this world, both with astronomically greater funding and scale than anyone you or I are likely to work on. Yet people continue to obsess about these unicorns and assume the choices they've had to make are clearly the right choices for everyone. The greatest problem with modern devops is peoples delusional ideas over the scale upon which they're really operating and where they're really going to start feeling the pinch. I've come across way too many tinpot "we're netflix!" setups that crumble under their own unmanageability as soon as they have budget and staff taken away from them for a couple of quarters.
    - scarface74 6y ago
      So you are claiming that there are only two companies that have successfully run a business on AWS? The reason for managed cloud is the same reason for using any other vendor. To let you focus on your core competencies that give you a competitive advantage. Do you also think companies shouldn’t use Github, Microsoft, Workday, Oracle, SalesForce, Atlassian, etc.? Do you know how much infrastructure you can buy for the fully allocated code of one employee? Maybe they know something that you don’t know... Seeing that even Amazon admits that only 5% of Enterprise workloads are on any cloud provider, who is arguing that it is always the right choice? I command a higher than (local) market salary for an individual contributor in no small part because of my expertise when it comes to AWS, but I’m the first person to tell someone who asks me for advice when it doesn’t make sense to bother with the complexity and cost of a cloud provider and just use a colo, VPS, or just use AWS Lightsail (AWS’s answer to companies like Linode).
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - momokoko 6y ago
        > Do you know how much infrastructure you can buy for the fully allocated code of one employee? $10k does not get you very far with AWS.
ris 6y ago
> In all of my time as an engineering manager, the number of times that avoiding vendor lock in has solved more problems than it caused is still zero. How long have you stuck around to find out? Never had to undertake a massive task to migrate an existing system that's closely bound to its legacy platform? Because that's the other side of the coin. I also highly suspect that number is not zero, you're just not counting the obvious decisions people make every day that avoid lock-in because they seem like common sense. But I suspect you're not building everything using ColdFusion, though, or doing your version control through Perforce... > Use the best tools available at your disposal to get the job done. Behind this phrase lies the fallacy that there is any such thing as "the best tool" and the implication that anyone doing anything different is a clear idiot. In reality, everyone uses "the best tool", it's just they have different metrics by which they measure it.