5 ms·

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
      [deleted]
    - rad_gruchalski 5y ago
      It can be done. Putting the right abstractions in front of these services makes it possible to migrate and replacements exist. Okay, granted, there will be complexity in self hosted infra but it is possible.
      - sneak 5y ago
        I don't really think anyone with anything less than an 8 figure budget can get the perf/watt of Graviton2. They're literally not available for sale - AWS had them fabbed and then kept all of them to rent out.
        wmf 5y ago
        It's called Ampere Altra. Maybe you should have picked a different example like Aurora...
        sneak 5y ago
        Have you tried? Us startuppy mortals can't buy those today, unfortunately. Maybe in a few years, when they trickle down from the people with 8 figure budgets.
        leesalminen 5y ago
        Aurora is the one service that got us to migrate to AWS! Honestly it saved us 5 digits per month over another MySQLaaS. For us it was a very good deal. We could’ve dedicated engineering time to reduce db cost on the old provider but Aurora was drop-in awesomeness.
        rad_gruchalski 5y ago
        Hardware is difficult, for sure. The managed services / proprietary services is another story. Having said that, and please keep in mind that I do not have an idea much about hardware so this is a guesswork; more of a question than a statement..., I do think that the Graviton price vs performance might not have a direct benefit outside of AWS. It's cool for AWS because they have less stuff to manage at that scale and it might be cheaper for them to buy and iterate because only they use it. It looks great to the clients because the perception is that the value is better. But AWS runs 80 AZs in 25 regions so it benefits them at that scale. Realistically, even if one had couple of hundreds of racks, does it matter at that scale?
- rualca 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. It's not limited to some. You absolutely need a whole new team (or teams) to handle your infrastructure, your high availability needs, and also your security. The nifty serverless offerings and other features are just nice-to-haves in comparison to the core infrastructure work that cloud providers put into your system to keep it running. Just because cloud providers like GCP and AWS and Azure and etc have everything put together to let you setup your whole infra by running a small script that does not mean nothing needs to be done in order for that to work.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  > such as AWS proprietary services like SQS SQS is a message queue service. It's a bit weird to claim that as "simply aren't directly available as selfhosted replacements", a message queue is pretty basic stuff.
  - sneak 5y ago
    SQS is "just a queue service" the way that S3 is "just an object store" and the iPhone is "just a smartphone". I'm super into self-hosted shared-nothing queue services, but what AWS is doing with SQS is anything but basic stuff.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
toyg 5y ago
> I guess they have no one thinking that far ahead Small businesses don't care because they are too busy surviving. Medium businesses don't care because why break what works? Large businesses don't care because their managerial careers promote short-term priorities and marquee "transformation" projects which are buzzword-driven, and cloud is the current one.
- emteycz 5y ago
  So what is the problem exactly?
  - jjoonathan 5y ago
    Paying more for less because of marketing. Life goes on. It happens all the time. The trick is to learn and be smarter next time.
taneq 5y ago
The ones thinking that far ahead aren’t using AWS in the first place.
- abrookewood 5y ago
  Yep, there the ones with stressed out Ops staff running around replacing hard drives at 3 AM and with managers trying to work out how they are going to pass the next security assessment because they don't handle end-to-end encryption or have sufficient controls in place.
  - addicted 5y ago
    Is this common? My company recently shifted from on prem to cloud. And we aren’t primarily a software company (although, much like most companies, we are increasingly turning into one). We outsourced our data center needs, and I don’t remember us ever facing these middle of the night massive breakdowns (we had load balancing between a couple of data centers) and the number of ops issues hasn’t reduced a bit since the switchover. I do think it’s been easier to improve performance for non US customers, because spinning up servers in data centers across the world seems a little easier around the world, but the millions saved by self hosting would have easily paid for someone to spin us up a Singapore and UK colo servers.
  - OldHand2018 5y ago
    If you spent $X on a SAN rack 10 years ago, that same $X now buys you a fully-managed rack with NVMe drives and redundant, hot-swappable everything. Your Ops staff will get an email about a drive or hardware failure and the tracking number for the replacement part that’s already left the depot and can be replaced at their leisure.
  - ZWoz 5y ago
    You experienced badly run shop. You can have remote hands (if you don't have your own DC, but buy colocation service). You have spare disks in server. I don't know, how end-to-end encryption is linked to bare metal, those physical servers are several abstraction levels below.
pie420 5y ago
A startup worrying about long term cloud implications is like a hot dog vendor in new York worrying about how his branding will be received in India when his hot dog empire expands there. 99.99% of startups will never have to worry about migrating off cloud, and if they do, they will have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, and will be once sequential. Nobody is losing sleep over the prospect that their startup will only be worth 22.4 billion in 17 years, but if they eschewed the cloud and built in efficiencies from the get go the company would be worth 23.7 billion. Not to mention the fact that worrying about long term things like that would take focus off the present and in tease chances of failure.
- mlindner 5y ago
  Nitpick, but we don't hear about the companies that failed in the mid-stage because they ended up being consumed by their AWS fees.
tw04 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 But you see part of the magic trick was Amazon spent years having companies like Garnter proclaim that cloud was cheaper, and nobody could possibly do on-premises IT cheaper because of economies of scale. As a result you've got CIOs everywhere trying to make a name for themselves by driving their company to the cloud to show immense cost savings. They don't have time to be bothered by the actual financial models or real costs. By the time finance realizes what happened they'll be on to the next gig. It was honestly brilliant, the number of "cloud first" strategies that originated in board rooms filled with people that don't know the first thing about IT is kind of disgusting.
benhurmarcel 5y ago
It can be a "trap" but also the best decision for a startup. It probably is actually.
- edogrider 5y ago
  When Companies Should Go to the Public Cloud + When they Should Return https://blog.min.io/repatriation_wave/ https://blog.min.io/repatriation_wave/

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
    [deleted]
  - rad_gruchalski 5y ago
    It can be done. Putting the right abstractions in front of these services makes it possible to migrate and replacements exist. Okay, granted, there will be complexity in self hosted infra but it is possible.
    - sneak 5y ago
      I don't really think anyone with anything less than an 8 figure budget can get the perf/watt of Graviton2. They're literally not available for sale - AWS had them fabbed and then kept all of them to rent out.
      - wmf 5y ago
        It's called Ampere Altra. Maybe you should have picked a different example like Aurora...
        sneak 5y ago
        Have you tried? Us startuppy mortals can't buy those today, unfortunately. Maybe in a few years, when they trickle down from the people with 8 figure budgets.
        leesalminen 5y ago
        Aurora is the one service that got us to migrate to AWS! Honestly it saved us 5 digits per month over another MySQLaaS. For us it was a very good deal. We could’ve dedicated engineering time to reduce db cost on the old provider but Aurora was drop-in awesomeness.
      - rad_gruchalski 5y ago
        Hardware is difficult, for sure. The managed services / proprietary services is another story. Having said that, and please keep in mind that I do not have an idea much about hardware so this is a guesswork; more of a question than a statement..., I do think that the Graviton price vs performance might not have a direct benefit outside of AWS. It's cool for AWS because they have less stuff to manage at that scale and it might be cheaper for them to buy and iterate because only they use it. It looks great to the clients because the perception is that the value is better. But AWS runs 80 AZs in 25 regions so it benefits them at that scale. Realistically, even if one had couple of hundreds of racks, does it matter at that scale?
rualca 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. It's not limited to some. You absolutely need a whole new team (or teams) to handle your infrastructure, your high availability needs, and also your security. The nifty serverless offerings and other features are just nice-to-haves in comparison to the core infrastructure work that cloud providers put into your system to keep it running. Just because cloud providers like GCP and AWS and Azure and etc have everything put together to let you setup your whole infra by running a small script that does not mean nothing needs to be done in order for that to work.
zozbot234 5y ago
> such as AWS proprietary services like SQS SQS is a message queue service. It's a bit weird to claim that as "simply aren't directly available as selfhosted replacements", a message queue is pretty basic stuff.
- sneak 5y ago
  SQS is "just a queue service" the way that S3 is "just an object store" and the iPhone is "just a smartphone". I'm super into self-hosted shared-nothing queue services, but what AWS is doing with SQS is anything but basic stuff.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

toyg 5y ago

> I guess they have no one thinking that far ahead Small businesses don't care because they are too busy surviving. Medium businesses don't care because why break what works? Large businesses don't care because their managerial careers promote short-term priorities and marquee "transformation" projects which are buzzword-driven, and cloud is the current one.

emteycz 5y ago
So what is the problem exactly?
- jjoonathan 5y ago
  Paying more for less because of marketing. Life goes on. It happens all the time. The trick is to learn and be smarter next time.

taneq 5y ago

The ones thinking that far ahead aren’t using AWS in the first place.

abrookewood 5y ago
Yep, there the ones with stressed out Ops staff running around replacing hard drives at 3 AM and with managers trying to work out how they are going to pass the next security assessment because they don't handle end-to-end encryption or have sufficient controls in place.
- addicted 5y ago
  Is this common? My company recently shifted from on prem to cloud. And we aren’t primarily a software company (although, much like most companies, we are increasingly turning into one). We outsourced our data center needs, and I don’t remember us ever facing these middle of the night massive breakdowns (we had load balancing between a couple of data centers) and the number of ops issues hasn’t reduced a bit since the switchover. I do think it’s been easier to improve performance for non US customers, because spinning up servers in data centers across the world seems a little easier around the world, but the millions saved by self hosting would have easily paid for someone to spin us up a Singapore and UK colo servers.
- OldHand2018 5y ago
  If you spent $X on a SAN rack 10 years ago, that same $X now buys you a fully-managed rack with NVMe drives and redundant, hot-swappable everything. Your Ops staff will get an email about a drive or hardware failure and the tracking number for the replacement part that’s already left the depot and can be replaced at their leisure.
- ZWoz 5y ago
  You experienced badly run shop. You can have remote hands (if you don't have your own DC, but buy colocation service). You have spare disks in server. I don't know, how end-to-end encryption is linked to bare metal, those physical servers are several abstraction levels below.

pie420 5y ago

A startup worrying about long term cloud implications is like a hot dog vendor in new York worrying about how his branding will be received in India when his hot dog empire expands there. 99.99% of startups will never have to worry about migrating off cloud, and if they do, they will have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, and will be once sequential. Nobody is losing sleep over the prospect that their startup will only be worth 22.4 billion in 17 years, but if they eschewed the cloud and built in efficiencies from the get go the company would be worth 23.7 billion. Not to mention the fact that worrying about long term things like that would take focus off the present and in tease chances of failure.

mlindner 5y ago
Nitpick, but we don't hear about the companies that failed in the mid-stage because they ended up being consumed by their AWS fees.

tw04 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 But you see part of the magic trick was Amazon spent years having companies like Garnter proclaim that cloud was cheaper, and nobody could possibly do on-premises IT cheaper because of economies of scale. As a result you've got CIOs everywhere trying to make a name for themselves by driving their company to the cloud to show immense cost savings. They don't have time to be bothered by the actual financial models or real costs. By the time finance realizes what happened they'll be on to the next gig. It was honestly brilliant, the number of "cloud first" strategies that originated in board rooms filled with people that don't know the first thing about IT is kind of disgusting.

benhurmarcel 5y ago

It can be a "trap" but also the best decision for a startup. It probably is actually.

edogrider 5y ago
When Companies Should Go to the Public Cloud + When they Should Return https://blog.min.io/repatriation_wave/ https://blog.min.io/repatriation_wave/