12 ms·

Many far smarter people have said this before, far more eloquently than I can, but in short: Cloud Computing (and SASS even more so) is little more than just a

Many far smarter people have said this before, far more eloquently than I can, but in short: Cloud Computing (and SASS even more so) is little more than just another attempt to recreate access/info monopolies, essentially the same profit proposition as existed with closed source software, while pretending to be one of the cool kids and use politically more acceptable (but in this context rather meaningless) terms like Open Source and Open Standards. It may be a different generation of companies, with slightly different cultures, but they are all equally predatory in nature as the old ones. It's going to be a rude awakening, when some of the bigger service providers will eventually fall over (which they will). Of course, everyone will blame anything and everything but their own willful ignorance, when that happens.

scarface74 6y ago
What do you propose? That every company reinvent the wheel or host everything locally even if it’s not their core competency? Every company has to decide what its “unfair advantage” is and concentrate on that.
- AriaMinaei 6y ago
  I think you are jumping to the "What do you propose?" question before understanding the pain point first. You are asking for a solution before agreeing that there exists a problem. This is the "I'll listen to your problem if the solution is convenient" mentality. It's inside-the-box thinking. It holds you back.
  - scarface74 6y ago
    The opposite of depending on another company to host a service is to host it yourself. The average company of any size has at least a dozen external SAAS dependencies. Do you want to have the expense of managing all of those services yourself?
    - mrmonkeyman 6y ago
      That's the easy part.
      - scarface74 6y ago
        Really? Have you taken into account the fully allocated cost of the employee to manage it and the hosting cost? Do you have a DR strategy?
      - throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
        What is "The average company of any size"? It depends on what you want but managing complex software may be expensive and has some serious economies of scale, which makes a pressure to outsource, even expensively. You can't just brush it off with 'that's easy', it's not.
    - mynegation 6y ago
      Anecdote, but here is a specific situation. Company X has both internal cloud (based on OpenShift) and “public” cloud (Y: one of the big three cloud providers). Application team Z has applications on both, for historical reasons. One of these days application on the internal cloud fails, remediation requires attention from X’s infrastructure team (which is not the same and quite removed from application team), situation is dragging for hours initially and repercussions are cleaned up for several days afterwards. Business is losing money and is furious. Similar situations happens on a public cloud, application team gets a tech resource from Y calling back in two minutes and the whole situation is resolved in two hours. The immediate costs are only part of the picture.
      - PaulHoule 6y ago
        It goes both ways. There have been times that the control plane blew up in one zone of one cloud provider. I had a least-complexity system which lived in that zone so it kept functioning as if nothing happened. Other people panicked or had their automation freak out for them, they tried to restore their multi-AZ systems, overloading the control plane for the whole region. It's a stressful experience if you feel you can't do anything about it, and sooner or later you will feel it with cloud computing: periods of 8-12 hours where your environment is FUBAR and you are best having some faith they will stitch it back together and walk away from it for a while.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  What's wrong with hosting software locally and buying 3rd-party support for the stuff that's "not core competency"? It eliminates a single point of failure.
  - scarface74 6y ago
    >What’s wrong with hosting software locally....it eliminates a single point of failure. I’ll let that just sit there. But you are going to host your own project management software? Your own expense reporting software? Your own email server? Your own payroll processing? Salesforce equivalent? Your own git server? Dropbox equivalent?
    - encom 6y ago
      Why not?
      - scarface74 6y ago
        A) are you willing to spend the money on servers and staff to maintain it? B) would it have the same reliability characteristics? C) do you have a DR strategy? D) after you spend all that money, did it help you either save money or make money? Did it give you a competitive advantage? Did it help you go to market faster?
      - gav 6y ago
        Short answer: generally it costs more money for worse results. Longer answer: doing things in-house that are outside your core competencies and/or value creation model is a poor use of scarce resources (both capital and human—predominantly management bandwidth) and increases risk carried. To give a concrete example: imagine you need to host your source code repository. You can pay for something like Bitbucket for $6/month/user and not have to worry about it. It’s a price that scales linearly with your team size and is a tiny fraction of their total cost. Doing it in-house: you have to pay for hardware, storage, worry about backups, have somebody support it, have somebody manage the person that supports it, deal with users, find a solution to remote access, and so on. But all these miss the big cost—risk—what happens if the server dies or your office burns down? Nobody used to get fired for buying IBM, nobody now gets fired for buying a popular SaaS product. You aren’t Google, at some point scale changes the equation, but that’s a rare spot to be in.
- z3t4 6y ago
  There is a third option: Let someone else host it. Having only one supplier is a monopoly. But if many companies compete about serving customers, you can choose the company with the best service, or if you prefer - the lowest prices.
  - scarface74 6y ago
    No one company provides all of the services that the typical corporation needs.
jasode 6y ago
>Cloud Computing (and SASS even more so) is little more than just another attempt to recreate access/info monopolies, [...] , everyone will blame anything and everything but their own willful ignorance, For some reason, "cloud computing" has become a bogeyman and therefore corporations paying for it are clueless "sheeple". To help prevent the phrase "cloud computing" from distorting our thinking, we have to remember that companies have been paying others for off-premise computing without calling it "cloud" or "SaaS" for decades before Amazon AWS, Salesforce, etc existed. Examples... In the 1960s, IBM's SABRE[1] airline reservations system was the "cloud" for companies like American Airlines, Delta, etc. In the 1980s, many companies used to process payroll in-house accounting software and print paychecks on self-owned dot-matrix printers. But most companies eventually outsourced all that to specialized companies such as ADP[2]. Companies tried to manage employees' retirement benefits on in-house software but most outsource that to companies like Fidelity[3]. Likewise, even companies that self-fund their own healthcare benefits will still outsource the administration to a company like Cigna[4]. Don't install a bunch of "healthcare management software" on your own on-premise servers. Just use the "cloud/SaaS" computers that Cigna has. Some companies (really old ones) used to print their own stock ownership certificates and mail them out to grandma. Now, virtually every company outsources that to another company. Most companies that have Employee Stock Purchase Plans outsource the administration of it to a company like Computershare[5]. The major difference with "cloud" terminology taking hold is that services like AWS is offering generic compute (EC2) and non-vertical industry solutions. Otherwise, the so-called "cloud" has been going on for decades. Amazon AWS made "cloud" really convenient by allocating off-premise resources via a web interface (dashboard or REST api) instead of calling a salesperson from IBM/ADP/Fidelity/Cigna/etc. That doesn't mean it's always correct to buy into everything the cloud offers. Pick and choose the tradeoffs that make financial sense. Netflix got rid of their datacenters and moved 100% of the customer billing to the cloud. But Dropbox did the opposite and migrated from AWS to their own datacenter. They're both correct for their situations. >, when some of the bigger service providers will eventually fall over (which they will). The big established vendors like AWS, Azure, and GCP ... all have enough business that they will be around for decades. If anybody will exit, I'd guess it would be the smaller players like Oracle Cloud. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabre_(computer_system)#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabre_(computer_system)#Histor... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADP_(company) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADP_(company) [3] https://www.fidelityworkplace.com/ https://www.fidelityworkplace.com/ [4] https://www.cigna.com/assets/docs/business/medium-employers/cigna-funding-solutions-brochure.pdf https://www.cigna.com/assets/docs/business/medium-employers/... [5] https://www.computershare.com/us/business/employee-equity-plans/employee-stock-purchase-plans https://www.computershare.com/us/business/employee-equity-pl...
walleeee 6y ago
> Cloud Computing (and SASS even more so) is little more than just another attempt to recreate access/info monopolies Maybe this is true of some commercial cloud companies, but "cloud" computing is much larger in scope than you make it sound. There is a whole shadow PaaS/SaaS world used primarily by various research communities, for instance, often called "grid" instead of cloud, wherein nearly everything is publicly funded and the value proposition is web-based access to data stores, HPC clusters, etc, instead of every individual hacking their own data science environment on their laptop.
seanhunter 6y ago
I don't think that's the full picture. There are lots of good reasons for small and medium-sized providers of b2c software to prefer SaaS and cloud delivery over on-premises that aren't anything to do with access/info monopolies. For example as a small provider you'll just kill all your velocity if you try to deliver on-prem to a number of large enterprises. They will all have different upgrade policies, testing and approval policies, different approved hardware etc etc and pretty soon you will suffer a death from 1000 cuts and not be able to deliver anything. For example, I had a client once say to me that we had to replace postgres in our stack with Oracle because that was their approved database. Even though we had to support the stack. I had a client delay us by 6 months because they decided to order super bleeding-edge network cards (which I repeatedly said we didn't need) then these cards turned out to take ages to deliver, when they arrived they didn't work with the "corporate approved" version of linux they insisted on using for another couple of months etc. In a saas you don't have to deal with any of those things. You do the one-off (painful) third-party vendor approval process, go through all the infosec audits etc but after that you own the stack and can run it the way you want. If you want to change the hardware layout and it's on prem you have to go cap-in-hand to the client and get them to stump up cash, wait months while physical boxes get allocated, racked up etc. If you're in-cloud, you make a change to terraform, check it in and it gets pushed out through your CI/CD pipeline. If you want to roll changes to all your customers that's really easy as a SaaS/cloud offering whereas it's very hard if they're each on-prem. etc etc It's easy to be cynical, but there are very significant benefits to the vendor of this model. There can also be benefits to the customer too. In addition, in my experience when you deal with a big enterprise customer you are contractually committed to providing "transition assistance" when the contract ends (even if your company goes bust) and returning data in mutually-agreed open formats. So vendor lockin doesn't really apply eithre.
- Buge 6y ago
  You say b2c but all the examples sound like b2b.
  - seanhunter 6y ago
    Yeah that's an annoying typo. I meant b2b of course.

scarface74 6y ago

What do you propose? That every company reinvent the wheel or host everything locally even if it’s not their core competency? Every company has to decide what its “unfair advantage” is and concentrate on that.

AriaMinaei 6y ago
I think you are jumping to the "What do you propose?" question before understanding the pain point first. You are asking for a solution before agreeing that there exists a problem. This is the "I'll listen to your problem if the solution is convenient" mentality. It's inside-the-box thinking. It holds you back.
- scarface74 6y ago
  The opposite of depending on another company to host a service is to host it yourself. The average company of any size has at least a dozen external SAAS dependencies. Do you want to have the expense of managing all of those services yourself?
  - mrmonkeyman 6y ago
    That's the easy part.
    - scarface74 6y ago
      Really? Have you taken into account the fully allocated cost of the employee to manage it and the hosting cost? Do you have a DR strategy?
    - throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
      What is "The average company of any size"? It depends on what you want but managing complex software may be expensive and has some serious economies of scale, which makes a pressure to outsource, even expensively. You can't just brush it off with 'that's easy', it's not.
  - mynegation 6y ago
    Anecdote, but here is a specific situation. Company X has both internal cloud (based on OpenShift) and “public” cloud (Y: one of the big three cloud providers). Application team Z has applications on both, for historical reasons. One of these days application on the internal cloud fails, remediation requires attention from X’s infrastructure team (which is not the same and quite removed from application team), situation is dragging for hours initially and repercussions are cleaned up for several days afterwards. Business is losing money and is furious. Similar situations happens on a public cloud, application team gets a tech resource from Y calling back in two minutes and the whole situation is resolved in two hours. The immediate costs are only part of the picture.
    - PaulHoule 6y ago
      It goes both ways. There have been times that the control plane blew up in one zone of one cloud provider. I had a least-complexity system which lived in that zone so it kept functioning as if nothing happened. Other people panicked or had their automation freak out for them, they tried to restore their multi-AZ systems, overloading the control plane for the whole region. It's a stressful experience if you feel you can't do anything about it, and sooner or later you will feel it with cloud computing: periods of 8-12 hours where your environment is FUBAR and you are best having some faith they will stitch it back together and walk away from it for a while.
zozbot234 6y ago
What's wrong with hosting software locally and buying 3rd-party support for the stuff that's "not core competency"? It eliminates a single point of failure.
- scarface74 6y ago
  >What’s wrong with hosting software locally....it eliminates a single point of failure. I’ll let that just sit there. But you are going to host your own project management software? Your own expense reporting software? Your own email server? Your own payroll processing? Salesforce equivalent? Your own git server? Dropbox equivalent?
  - encom 6y ago
    Why not?
    - scarface74 6y ago
      A) are you willing to spend the money on servers and staff to maintain it? B) would it have the same reliability characteristics? C) do you have a DR strategy? D) after you spend all that money, did it help you either save money or make money? Did it give you a competitive advantage? Did it help you go to market faster?
    - gav 6y ago
      Short answer: generally it costs more money for worse results. Longer answer: doing things in-house that are outside your core competencies and/or value creation model is a poor use of scarce resources (both capital and human—predominantly management bandwidth) and increases risk carried. To give a concrete example: imagine you need to host your source code repository. You can pay for something like Bitbucket for $6/month/user and not have to worry about it. It’s a price that scales linearly with your team size and is a tiny fraction of their total cost. Doing it in-house: you have to pay for hardware, storage, worry about backups, have somebody support it, have somebody manage the person that supports it, deal with users, find a solution to remote access, and so on. But all these miss the big cost—risk—what happens if the server dies or your office burns down? Nobody used to get fired for buying IBM, nobody now gets fired for buying a popular SaaS product. You aren’t Google, at some point scale changes the equation, but that’s a rare spot to be in.
z3t4 6y ago
There is a third option: Let someone else host it. Having only one supplier is a monopoly. But if many companies compete about serving customers, you can choose the company with the best service, or if you prefer - the lowest prices.
- scarface74 6y ago
  No one company provides all of the services that the typical corporation needs.

jasode 6y ago

>Cloud Computing (and SASS even more so) is little more than just another attempt to recreate access/info monopolies, [...] , everyone will blame anything and everything but their own willful ignorance, For some reason, "cloud computing" has become a bogeyman and therefore corporations paying for it are clueless "sheeple". To help prevent the phrase "cloud computing" from distorting our thinking, we have to remember that companies have been paying others for off-premise computing without calling it "cloud" or "SaaS" for decades before Amazon AWS, Salesforce, etc existed. Examples... In the 1960s, IBM's SABRE[1] airline reservations system was the "cloud" for companies like American Airlines, Delta, etc. In the 1980s, many companies used to process payroll in-house accounting software and print paychecks on self-owned dot-matrix printers. But most companies eventually outsourced all that to specialized companies such as ADP[2]. Companies tried to manage employees' retirement benefits on in-house software but most outsource that to companies like Fidelity[3]. Likewise, even companies that self-fund their own healthcare benefits will still outsource the administration to a company like Cigna[4]. Don't install a bunch of "healthcare management software" on your own on-premise servers. Just use the "cloud/SaaS" computers that Cigna has. Some companies (really old ones) used to print their own stock ownership certificates and mail them out to grandma. Now, virtually every company outsources that to another company. Most companies that have Employee Stock Purchase Plans outsource the administration of it to a company like Computershare[5]. The major difference with "cloud" terminology taking hold is that services like AWS is offering generic compute (EC2) and non-vertical industry solutions. Otherwise, the so-called "cloud" has been going on for decades. Amazon AWS made "cloud" really convenient by allocating off-premise resources via a web interface (dashboard or REST api) instead of calling a salesperson from IBM/ADP/Fidelity/Cigna/etc. That doesn't mean it's always correct to buy into everything the cloud offers. Pick and choose the tradeoffs that make financial sense. Netflix got rid of their datacenters and moved 100% of the customer billing to the cloud. But Dropbox did the opposite and migrated from AWS to their own datacenter. They're both correct for their situations. >, when some of the bigger service providers will eventually fall over (which they will). The big established vendors like AWS, Azure, and GCP ... all have enough business that they will be around for decades. If anybody will exit, I'd guess it would be the smaller players like Oracle Cloud. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabre_(computer_system)#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabre_(computer_system)#Histor... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADP_(company) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADP_(company) [3] https://www.fidelityworkplace.com/ https://www.fidelityworkplace.com/ [4] https://www.cigna.com/assets/docs/business/medium-employers/cigna-funding-solutions-brochure.pdf https://www.cigna.com/assets/docs/business/medium-employers/... [5] https://www.computershare.com/us/business/employee-equity-plans/employee-stock-purchase-plans https://www.computershare.com/us/business/employee-equity-pl...

walleeee 6y ago

> Cloud Computing (and SASS even more so) is little more than just another attempt to recreate access/info monopolies Maybe this is true of some commercial cloud companies, but "cloud" computing is much larger in scope than you make it sound. There is a whole shadow PaaS/SaaS world used primarily by various research communities, for instance, often called "grid" instead of cloud, wherein nearly everything is publicly funded and the value proposition is web-based access to data stores, HPC clusters, etc, instead of every individual hacking their own data science environment on their laptop.

seanhunter 6y ago

I don't think that's the full picture. There are lots of good reasons for small and medium-sized providers of b2c software to prefer SaaS and cloud delivery over on-premises that aren't anything to do with access/info monopolies. For example as a small provider you'll just kill all your velocity if you try to deliver on-prem to a number of large enterprises. They will all have different upgrade policies, testing and approval policies, different approved hardware etc etc and pretty soon you will suffer a death from 1000 cuts and not be able to deliver anything. For example, I had a client once say to me that we had to replace postgres in our stack with Oracle because that was their approved database. Even though we had to support the stack. I had a client delay us by 6 months because they decided to order super bleeding-edge network cards (which I repeatedly said we didn't need) then these cards turned out to take ages to deliver, when they arrived they didn't work with the "corporate approved" version of linux they insisted on using for another couple of months etc. In a saas you don't have to deal with any of those things. You do the one-off (painful) third-party vendor approval process, go through all the infosec audits etc but after that you own the stack and can run it the way you want. If you want to change the hardware layout and it's on prem you have to go cap-in-hand to the client and get them to stump up cash, wait months while physical boxes get allocated, racked up etc. If you're in-cloud, you make a change to terraform, check it in and it gets pushed out through your CI/CD pipeline. If you want to roll changes to all your customers that's really easy as a SaaS/cloud offering whereas it's very hard if they're each on-prem. etc etc It's easy to be cynical, but there are very significant benefits to the vendor of this model. There can also be benefits to the customer too. In addition, in my experience when you deal with a big enterprise customer you are contractually committed to providing "transition assistance" when the contract ends (even if your company goes bust) and returning data in mutually-agreed open formats. So vendor lockin doesn't really apply eithre.

Buge 6y ago
You say b2c but all the examples sound like b2b.
- seanhunter 6y ago
  Yeah that's an annoying typo. I meant b2b of course.