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>The key difference with this current cloud embrace is that big billion dollar businesses are making their core business dependent on Amazon/Google/Microsoft cl

by jasode 6y ago

>The key difference with this current cloud embrace is that big billion dollar businesses are making their core business dependent on Amazon/Google/Microsoft cloud services. There's still some history missing there. Before AWS/GCP/Azure, billion dollar businesses were making their _core_ business dependent on datacenters owned by HP/IBM/Sungard/Origin/Exodus/etc. E.g. Google's early search engine (their core business) in 1999 ran on servers at Exodus datacenter. Many of The Washington Post's core computing was provided by IBM's data center before Amazon AWS existed. In the 1990s, many businesses also had SAP ERP for core business processes that was managed by outsourced datacenters. (Both HP and IBM offered "managed SAP" hosting services.) When SAP went down, manufacturing lines got shut down, or no products got picked for shipping and trucks would sit idling. It's a similar disruption with AWS outages today. Therefore, switching from lesser known and older "cloud" such as Origin/Exodus/etc to AWS/Azure/GCP is not that radical or as dangerous as some believe. Before AWS, many companies still depended and trusted other companies to provide off-premise reliable computer infrastructure. We just didn't call it "cloud" back in the 1990s. Today's AWS/Azure/GCP with their modern multi-zone failover architectures are more reliable than the old HP/Origin datacenters that businesses used to depend on.

toast0 6y ago
Exodus and similar colocations aren't really the same thing. They're selling you rack space with connectivity, you bring the servers. If you outgrow that, or they go out of business, you 'only' need to get connectivity to a new facility and drive your servers across town. If you outgrown IBM/AWS/etc, you need to get connectivity and servers and run any services you were relying on. That's a lot bigger dependency.
- zaphar 6y ago
  While you can bring your own servers most of the time you rent those servers from them. You do this so that you can get fast turnaround on warranty replacements or repairs. You can use on-site hardware support and you get a lot of other benefits. When you think about it it's a lot like AWS except AWS offers those benefits even better than the old school places. You can have your own servers but it's at the cost of slower turn around on hardware issues.
kortilla 6y ago
Google didn’t depend on one colo in all but the very earliest days. Exodus ceasing to exist would not have ended the company. It’s not even clear Intuit could continue to exist if Amazon disappeared, which was an unheard of level of dependency until the last decade.

by jasode 6y ago

toast0 6y ago

Exodus and similar colocations aren't really the same thing. They're selling you rack space with connectivity, you bring the servers. If you outgrow that, or they go out of business, you 'only' need to get connectivity to a new facility and drive your servers across town. If you outgrown IBM/AWS/etc, you need to get connectivity and servers and run any services you were relying on. That's a lot bigger dependency.

zaphar 6y ago
While you can bring your own servers most of the time you rent those servers from them. You do this so that you can get fast turnaround on warranty replacements or repairs. You can use on-site hardware support and you get a lot of other benefits. When you think about it it's a lot like AWS except AWS offers those benefits even better than the old school places. You can have your own servers but it's at the cost of slower turn around on hardware issues.

kortilla 6y ago

Google didn’t depend on one colo in all but the very earliest days. Exodus ceasing to exist would not have ended the company. It’s not even clear Intuit could continue to exist if Amazon disappeared, which was an unheard of level of dependency until the last decade.