4 ms·

> If $cloud_vendor doubled their prices tomorrow, what are you going to do ? > If $cloud_vendor decided to kill-off a product tomorrow and replace it with anot

> If $cloud_vendor doubled their prices tomorrow, what are you going to do ? > If $cloud_vendor decided to kill-off a product tomorrow and replace it with another one with a different API, what are you going to do ? Been using AWS for close to ~10 years now and I don't recall them doing anything remotely similar to above. Of course, they could potentially do it in the coming days. But going by their past behaviour I'd say it's a low probability event. When the cloud/AWS was new these fears were indeed valid. But this line of reasoning is getting old and tiring; especially when it's not backed by even anecdotal evidence and is purely speculative-fear in nature. I do know that Google, Twitter and others have pulled down some fairly popular APIs/products but please don't conflate that with GCP/AWS/cloud offerings. For most of the startups it's not even a question of if cloud now. Early days (2010-2015ish) it used to be the case that engineers had to convince management about the advantages of cloud. Primarily because one had to mostly go hybrid as many of the services weren't in cloud yet (such as Route 53, RDS etc.,). It was a pain to maintain hybrid. Now it's possible to run 100% of tech stack in cloud. So it's the other way round; VCs and business folks will frown upon tech if they run on bare-metal/data-centre.

rhizome 5y ago
Should we infer zero off-cloud contingency plans, then?
- vishnugupta 5y ago
  Depends on factors such as business size, product life cycle stage etc., For a typical startup trying to figure out PMF and launch an MVP or figure out customer retention I'd be really surprised if off-cloud contingency is even on top-50 priority list. But for someone with a proven business model with a good revenue stream cloud dependency or vendor lock-in or single-vendor-point of failure does indeed become an action item to be worked upon. Or when a regulator requires setting up a DR site which they did for us back in 2015. We had no option but to set it up in a data-centre. Or let's say someone like Mighty (1) whose product is sort of competitor to AWS's (2). They wouldn't want to go anywhere near AWS or any cloud for that matter. And last I heard they were indeed ordering their own physical server machines. There are valid reasons to look for either hybrid or purely on-prem solutions as I listed a few above. But please don't forward "what if cost doubles" type of reasoning. All that said, I'd hypothesise not going full on cloud is an exception for a typical startup now a days. (1) https://www.mightyapp.com https://www.mightyapp.com (2) https://aws.amazon.com/workspaces/ https://aws.amazon.com/workspaces/
jayd16 5y ago
There was the time Google App Engine completely changed the pricing model. Although I guess that isn't technically GCP.

rhizome 5y ago

Should we infer zero off-cloud contingency plans, then?

vishnugupta 5y ago
Depends on factors such as business size, product life cycle stage etc., For a typical startup trying to figure out PMF and launch an MVP or figure out customer retention I'd be really surprised if off-cloud contingency is even on top-50 priority list. But for someone with a proven business model with a good revenue stream cloud dependency or vendor lock-in or single-vendor-point of failure does indeed become an action item to be worked upon. Or when a regulator requires setting up a DR site which they did for us back in 2015. We had no option but to set it up in a data-centre. Or let's say someone like Mighty (1) whose product is sort of competitor to AWS's (2). They wouldn't want to go anywhere near AWS or any cloud for that matter. And last I heard they were indeed ordering their own physical server machines. There are valid reasons to look for either hybrid or purely on-prem solutions as I listed a few above. But please don't forward "what if cost doubles" type of reasoning. All that said, I'd hypothesise not going full on cloud is an exception for a typical startup now a days. (1) https://www.mightyapp.com https://www.mightyapp.com (2) https://aws.amazon.com/workspaces/ https://aws.amazon.com/workspaces/

jayd16 5y ago

There was the time Google App Engine completely changed the pricing model. Although I guess that isn't technically GCP.