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I’ve seen this parroted so often with anything infrastructure related. Where do you magical people work that your company has managed to somehow find the time t

by scrose 5y ago

I’ve seen this parroted so often with anything infrastructure related. Where do you magical people work that your company has managed to somehow find the time to build out infrastructure that you can swap out to another provider on a whim? My assumption is you must already self-host and run everything without using any external providers.

zozbot234 5y ago
> somehow find the time to build out infrastructure that you can swap out to another provider on a whim? You can very much do that while staying in the cloud. It's all about engineering for flexibility.
- scrose 5y ago
  Ok.. so that still doesn't answer my question. How do you get the time and resources allocated to make your entire platform completely agnostic of specific cloud services while still operating in the cloud? Can you name a single company where that's done and they talked about it at all? We're talking about at least tripling developer workloads and general operating costs here and finding developers who can navigate different cloud and on-premise providers for... what? Even small companies have multiple engineering teams, and each of those teams has particular needs, and each of the engineers, analysts or general users may rely on some service AWS, GCP or some other cloud provider has. Any single person can now break this ideal flexibility requirement if it makes their life easier.
dilyevsky 5y ago
Happens all the time. I personally worked at co that went from aws to gcp and now are moving to azure and know of a few who did the same. So if you can change clouds you could move to onprem presumably if you can find folks who know how and don’t already work for your cloud provider
- scrose 5y ago
  My question was towards: > It's already demonstrated that the big cloud providers will cut you off with little warning if you run afoul of their political sensibilities. So the only way to use those services is in the most generic way you can, so that migrations don't cost more because of it. You are stating that you moved from one cloud to another. The question is how you manage to build a company of any size that can just flip a switch and move to a new service provider without needing to transition teams to using new services and that costing money. If we're talking about moving a simple server from AWS to GCP, sure that's no problem. But if you or anyone at your company is actually using a cloud providers services for more than hosting a server, there is no possible way you can just flip a switch and migrate over.
  - dilyevsky 5y ago
    I’m talking about annual cloud spends in tens of millions here. It’s doable but you have to design for this or it takes a long time
    - scarface74 5y ago
      And if you are spending in the tens of millions, any cloud provider is going to negotiate discounts with you to keep you on board. You’re not getting retail price. So you’re still spending more trying to maintain “cloud agnosticism” by hosting everything on VMs instead of using managed services.
      - dilyevsky 5y ago
        The discount is not as much as you’d think. They’ll do it for some high margin services like storage and gpu (where markup is just ridiculous) but won’t budge on network for some reason. In the end they gon getcha anyway
      - dilyevsky 5y ago
        Oh and btw the models that i had worked out had ~10-12mo breakeven for colo vs cloud including the discount since you’re doing 3y commit anyway. If you’re going with private dc you have to be really large to make it work but if you have large egress charge it becomes instantly worth it (like in dropbox case)

by scrose 5y ago

zozbot234 5y ago

> somehow find the time to build out infrastructure that you can swap out to another provider on a whim? You can very much do that while staying in the cloud. It's all about engineering for flexibility.

scrose 5y ago
Ok.. so that still doesn't answer my question. How do you get the time and resources allocated to make your entire platform completely agnostic of specific cloud services while still operating in the cloud? Can you name a single company where that's done and they talked about it at all? We're talking about at least tripling developer workloads and general operating costs here and finding developers who can navigate different cloud and on-premise providers for... what? Even small companies have multiple engineering teams, and each of those teams has particular needs, and each of the engineers, analysts or general users may rely on some service AWS, GCP or some other cloud provider has. Any single person can now break this ideal flexibility requirement if it makes their life easier.

dilyevsky 5y ago

Happens all the time. I personally worked at co that went from aws to gcp and now are moving to azure and know of a few who did the same. So if you can change clouds you could move to onprem presumably if you can find folks who know how and don’t already work for your cloud provider

scrose 5y ago
My question was towards: > It's already demonstrated that the big cloud providers will cut you off with little warning if you run afoul of their political sensibilities. So the only way to use those services is in the most generic way you can, so that migrations don't cost more because of it. You are stating that you moved from one cloud to another. The question is how you manage to build a company of any size that can just flip a switch and move to a new service provider without needing to transition teams to using new services and that costing money. If we're talking about moving a simple server from AWS to GCP, sure that's no problem. But if you or anyone at your company is actually using a cloud providers services for more than hosting a server, there is no possible way you can just flip a switch and migrate over.
- dilyevsky 5y ago
  I’m talking about annual cloud spends in tens of millions here. It’s doable but you have to design for this or it takes a long time
  - scarface74 5y ago
    And if you are spending in the tens of millions, any cloud provider is going to negotiate discounts with you to keep you on board. You’re not getting retail price. So you’re still spending more trying to maintain “cloud agnosticism” by hosting everything on VMs instead of using managed services.
    - dilyevsky 5y ago
      The discount is not as much as you’d think. They’ll do it for some high margin services like storage and gpu (where markup is just ridiculous) but won’t budge on network for some reason. In the end they gon getcha anyway
    - dilyevsky 5y ago
      Oh and btw the models that i had worked out had ~10-12mo breakeven for colo vs cloud including the discount since you’re doing 3y commit anyway. If you’re going with private dc you have to be really large to make it work but if you have large egress charge it becomes instantly worth it (like in dropbox case)