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Am I alone in not seeing a paradox here? It's no different from a variety of things that make sense at some scales and not at others. Seems similar to office s

Am I alone in not seeing a paradox here? It's no different from a variety of things that make sense at some scales and not at others. Seems similar to office space - a 5 person company will find the economics of coworking space compelling, a 500 person company will do better with a long-term lease with a commercial landlord, and a 50,000 person company might have their own property management team in-house. That doesn't create a paradox in the commercial real estate market, just different solutions for different needs.

void_mint 5y ago
> Am I alone in not seeing a paradox here? It's no different from a variety of things that make sense at some scales and not at others. Yes, it's not a paradox at all. Use this thing until it doesn't make sense, and then don't use it anymore (or be comfortable with the lack of optimization). This is not a paradox.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  I assume the article gets more attention if it uses the word paradox.
dinoreic 5y ago
I think point guy tried to make is, that ton of big companies, that would/could benefit from in-house solution still go for full cloud based one without thinking about alternatives.
nine_k 5y ago
The paradox is that if the coworking space were the cloud, it would just grow with you, and easily house a 50k-strong company, while you'd be paying the same (high) rate per employee. Why would this happen? Because what the company builds is a large and growing money-making contraption right inside the coworking space, also using parts of the building for critical functions, and the door is intentionally kept small. The only way to move that contraption is to dismantle it and reassamble in a much cheaper, purpose-built hangar, rebuilding some of the critical parts along the way. During all that time, the contraption would stop making money. That's the beauty of AWS business model: it's a no-brainer for a startup to use it, but the startup grows, more financially efficient infrastructure options become unattainable because of the very high cost of the move. This is the best-executed vendor lock-in I know.
- okareaman 5y ago
  This seems like a well known trap that people would know how to avoid with a little planning, but I guess they have no one thinking that far ahead
  - sneak 5y ago
    There's also the argument that some of the cloud advantages (such as AWS proprietary services like SQS) simply aren't directly available as selfhosted replacements. You end up needing a whole new team to do HA/scaling for a core service. There are off the shelf things for, say, S3 and ALB which are entirely workable, but once you start getting into more complicated stuff (like S3's new consistency semantics, or SQS) then you're looking at a whole small company (at a minimum) worth of additional work. It's a non-trivial expansion, even for a large org with lots of money. You can avoid using these sorts of services to maintain flexibility/independence, but you lose out on their unique benefits. This isn't an accident. It's not like you're going to be able to selfhost an SES clone and get the same kind of deliverability percentages as AWS netblocks, no matter how many engineers you throw at the problem.
    - toomuchtodo 5y ago
      There are ways to engineer around this, but it’s going to depend on balancing risk management with business agility. Maybe you use Backblaze for object storage instead of S3. Maybe you use Cloudflare for CDN and Serverless at the edge. Maybe you use Mailgun or another SES competitor. Containers let you use managed k8s off the shelf anywhere. Lots of options for technologists, PMs, or CTOs to pick from.
      - sneak 5y ago
        Graviton2? Aurora? S3 global read-after-write consistency? Glacier? SQS's ability to scale? Some of the goods you just can't get anywhere else, and they know it.
        deleted 5y ago
Agingcoder 5y ago
The paradox is that in spite of the huge costs, very large companies are still moving to (or using) the cloud. I've had this discussion many times where I work, and we've refrained from using cloud services since they are extraordinary expensive compared to what we can do internally. Yet, people seem to be convinced that prices are ok, and that going outside will let them reduce their infrastructure footprint. For some reason I don't quite understand, people tend to be attracted by the cloud, even when it makes no sense economically whatsoever, and talking sense into them is surprisingly difficult. So yes, it seems obvious that people will choose the most cost effective solution. However, it seems like they don't!
- nemothekid 5y ago
  >The paradox is that in spite of the huge costs, very large companies are still moving to (or using) the cloud. In my experience when a large corporation moves to the cloud it has less to do with pricing and more to do flexibility. It's easier to get a budget from IT and do whatever you want in cloud, then to have to wait weeks/months putting in a PO for hardware, getting access to those machines and installing what you want.
  - throwawayboise 5y ago
    This is true. Where I work a PO was issued several weeks ago for a rack of servers, and delivery will be in about 3 months. If cost were no object, those resouces could be provisioned with a cloud provider today. And getting from requirements to RFQ to PO took another 3-4 months.
- sanderjd 5y ago
  People are attracted to it because owning stuff sucks. Renting stuff is more expensive but sucks less. This is why businesses often prefer opex to capex even if it is pretty significantly more expensive. It isn't just an IT phenomenon.
  - anitil 5y ago
    Yep people will pay through the nose to move from capex to opex. It baffled me at first, I think it baffles me less (but still a bit) now. Maybe one day I'll understand.
karmakaze 5y ago
A paradox is only at the most coarse-grained level. Cloud makes sense because of its cost-efficiency in scaling from nothing upwards. Then fails because of cost involved in keeping it running at scale. The thing to recognize is that what cloud is good for is rapid change. Once you have something stable, even at not-huge scales, bare-metal hosting may still make more sense. All this happens willingly unless growth happened with your eyes closed, or really had no choice keeping up with it. Sure, use the cloud, but don't use every cloud-proprietary convenience. Use opensource software in a near-standard way. Even if using the cloud-vendor's offering, refrain from using proprietary extensions. If your plan is to grow and get out before things stabilize, then that's on who's come onboard, not resisted the conveniences, and remaining.
Too 5y ago
The paradox is the sunken cost of your product easily becoming coupled to the cloud. Moving office is relatively simple, you call a moving company to lift all your chairs, print new business cards, hire a bigger maintenance crew and it's done within a week. Moving cloud could in worst case mean a 6 month complete rewrite of your core product depending on how much dependent you are to CosmosDB, Lambda or other shiny AWS stuff. You could say buying a machine you previously rented is the same thing but when looking at code migrations, rewrites and launching new infrastructure cost time from R&D, not just money.

void_mint 5y ago

> Am I alone in not seeing a paradox here? It's no different from a variety of things that make sense at some scales and not at others. Yes, it's not a paradox at all. Use this thing until it doesn't make sense, and then don't use it anymore (or be comfortable with the lack of optimization). This is not a paradox.

lotsofpulp 5y ago
I assume the article gets more attention if it uses the word paradox.

dinoreic 5y ago

I think point guy tried to make is, that ton of big companies, that would/could benefit from in-house solution still go for full cloud based one without thinking about alternatives.

nine_k 5y ago

The paradox is that if the coworking space were the cloud, it would just grow with you, and easily house a 50k-strong company, while you'd be paying the same (high) rate per employee. Why would this happen? Because what the company builds is a large and growing money-making contraption right inside the coworking space, also using parts of the building for critical functions, and the door is intentionally kept small. The only way to move that contraption is to dismantle it and reassamble in a much cheaper, purpose-built hangar, rebuilding some of the critical parts along the way. During all that time, the contraption would stop making money. That's the beauty of AWS business model: it's a no-brainer for a startup to use it, but the startup grows, more financially efficient infrastructure options become unattainable because of the very high cost of the move. This is the best-executed vendor lock-in I know.

okareaman 5y ago
This seems like a well known trap that people would know how to avoid with a little planning, but I guess they have no one thinking that far ahead
- sneak 5y ago
  There's also the argument that some of the cloud advantages (such as AWS proprietary services like SQS) simply aren't directly available as selfhosted replacements. You end up needing a whole new team to do HA/scaling for a core service. There are off the shelf things for, say, S3 and ALB which are entirely workable, but once you start getting into more complicated stuff (like S3's new consistency semantics, or SQS) then you're looking at a whole small company (at a minimum) worth of additional work. It's a non-trivial expansion, even for a large org with lots of money. You can avoid using these sorts of services to maintain flexibility/independence, but you lose out on their unique benefits. This isn't an accident. It's not like you're going to be able to selfhost an SES clone and get the same kind of deliverability percentages as AWS netblocks, no matter how many engineers you throw at the problem.
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago
    There are ways to engineer around this, but it’s going to depend on balancing risk management with business agility. Maybe you use Backblaze for object storage instead of S3. Maybe you use Cloudflare for CDN and Serverless at the edge. Maybe you use Mailgun or another SES competitor. Containers let you use managed k8s off the shelf anywhere. Lots of options for technologists, PMs, or CTOs to pick from.
    - sneak 5y ago
      Graviton2? Aurora? S3 global read-after-write consistency? Glacier? SQS's ability to scale? Some of the goods you just can't get anywhere else, and they know it.
      - deleted 5y ago

Agingcoder 5y ago

The paradox is that in spite of the huge costs, very large companies are still moving to (or using) the cloud. I've had this discussion many times where I work, and we've refrained from using cloud services since they are extraordinary expensive compared to what we can do internally. Yet, people seem to be convinced that prices are ok, and that going outside will let them reduce their infrastructure footprint. For some reason I don't quite understand, people tend to be attracted by the cloud, even when it makes no sense economically whatsoever, and talking sense into them is surprisingly difficult. So yes, it seems obvious that people will choose the most cost effective solution. However, it seems like they don't!

nemothekid 5y ago
>The paradox is that in spite of the huge costs, very large companies are still moving to (or using) the cloud. In my experience when a large corporation moves to the cloud it has less to do with pricing and more to do flexibility. It's easier to get a budget from IT and do whatever you want in cloud, then to have to wait weeks/months putting in a PO for hardware, getting access to those machines and installing what you want.
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  This is true. Where I work a PO was issued several weeks ago for a rack of servers, and delivery will be in about 3 months. If cost were no object, those resouces could be provisioned with a cloud provider today. And getting from requirements to RFQ to PO took another 3-4 months.
sanderjd 5y ago
People are attracted to it because owning stuff sucks. Renting stuff is more expensive but sucks less. This is why businesses often prefer opex to capex even if it is pretty significantly more expensive. It isn't just an IT phenomenon.
- anitil 5y ago
  Yep people will pay through the nose to move from capex to opex. It baffled me at first, I think it baffles me less (but still a bit) now. Maybe one day I'll understand.

karmakaze 5y ago

A paradox is only at the most coarse-grained level. Cloud makes sense because of its cost-efficiency in scaling from nothing upwards. Then fails because of cost involved in keeping it running at scale. The thing to recognize is that what cloud is good for is rapid change. Once you have something stable, even at not-huge scales, bare-metal hosting may still make more sense. All this happens willingly unless growth happened with your eyes closed, or really had no choice keeping up with it. Sure, use the cloud, but don't use every cloud-proprietary convenience. Use opensource software in a near-standard way. Even if using the cloud-vendor's offering, refrain from using proprietary extensions. If your plan is to grow and get out before things stabilize, then that's on who's come onboard, not resisted the conveniences, and remaining.

Too 5y ago

The paradox is the sunken cost of your product easily becoming coupled to the cloud. Moving office is relatively simple, you call a moving company to lift all your chairs, print new business cards, hire a bigger maintenance crew and it's done within a week. Moving cloud could in worst case mean a 6 month complete rewrite of your core product depending on how much dependent you are to CosmosDB, Lambda or other shiny AWS stuff. You could say buying a machine you previously rented is the same thing but when looking at code migrations, rewrites and launching new infrastructure cost time from R&D, not just money.