3 ms·

This might happen, but Cloud vendors will fight tooth and nail to stop it from happening, because the lower layers are commodities and a race to the bottom pric

This might happen, but Cloud vendors will fight tooth and nail to stop it from happening, because the lower layers are commodities and a race to the bottom pricewise. Also, many companies want a single neck to wring if anything goes wrong, and are thus unwilling to deal with a patchwork of third-party vendors. That said, telcos used to mint money from overseas calls, SMS, ringtones etc, until the Internet came along and everything went "over the top" (over data and thus outside operator billing). They didn't take that lying down, either (IIRC Skype was still banned in the UAE until COVID finally whacked some sense into them), but in the end telcos were still reduced to dumb pipes they are today.

raffraffraff 5y ago
The "single neck to wring" doesn't really exist unless you're a Salesforce / Atlassian / ServiceNow sized customer. Below a certain size, good luck getting support from AWS beyond "read the docs". The thing is, most of the time your outages are because you screwed up. "Shared responsibility" means that unless AWS actually loses a whole region for the day, or S3 actually loses your data forever, it is still "your fault". Because you didn't balance across AZs, take backups, test backup recovery, understand point-in-time recovery or egress charges etc. As the article says, CTOs don't change cloud providers. I've been on the hook for DR exercises where the same stack is running on the same cloud and they've failed because engineers make crazy number of invisible hard-coded design choices. Once you build your product on AWS, you're pretty much stuck there. K8s offers kinda-of an escape hatch, because it's possible to build your SaaS on EKS in such a way that it could be migrated to AKS or GKE, but it's still a ton of work for the plumbers. So the reason that AWS has this proliferation of ready-made services (and there are tons of them - try sitting an AWS professional certification) is that you'll generally use them in favour of deploying your own FOSS thing (even if it's "just a helm chart away"). Because running a database cluster (for example) is never as simple as just deploying it. Once your engineers decide to use Cognito, Lambda, Kinesis, Aurora instead of doing a DIY, you're locked in. Hell, it would even cost a fortune to simply download the data to close your account (because AWS Snowball doesn't have an egress option where they'll drive a few PB of your data to your data center in a semi-truck)
pid-1 5y ago
> This might happen, but Cloud vendors will fight tooth and nail to stop it from happening, They are failing badly IMO. Most developers I know hate the whole experience of using AWS. I can't complain much as I make good money by understanding their shit so others don't have to. That said, I always find amazing how one of the largest companies in the world does not a have a UI with happy paths for simple common cases. Most services are a hot mess of IAM, weird APIs, undocumented limitations and gotchas.
- jhickok 5y ago
  >They are failing badly IMO. Most developers I know hate the whole experience of using AWS. It doesn't have to be great, only better than the alternatives. I would argue most devs prefer the rocky experience of AWS to working with their own operations people on aging hardware.
  - randcraw 5y ago
    For now, maybe. But if your customers hate you, yet only a little less than they hate your competitors, all it takes is one new cloudSP to enter your market who ISN'T hated to completely wipe out the commodity low end of your business. Maybe the major cloud players believe they can buy up new & unhated competitors before they can establish a loyal user base. That strategy has worked pretty well so far for the vendors of mobile computing -- which just happens to be the primary consumer of low end cloud services. So if mobile can be commodified some day (the way unix workstations were by Linux), maybe basic cloud services can be too?

raffraffraff 5y ago

The "single neck to wring" doesn't really exist unless you're a Salesforce / Atlassian / ServiceNow sized customer. Below a certain size, good luck getting support from AWS beyond "read the docs". The thing is, most of the time your outages are because you screwed up. "Shared responsibility" means that unless AWS actually loses a whole region for the day, or S3 actually loses your data forever, it is still "your fault". Because you didn't balance across AZs, take backups, test backup recovery, understand point-in-time recovery or egress charges etc. As the article says, CTOs don't change cloud providers. I've been on the hook for DR exercises where the same stack is running on the same cloud and they've failed because engineers make crazy number of invisible hard-coded design choices. Once you build your product on AWS, you're pretty much stuck there. K8s offers kinda-of an escape hatch, because it's possible to build your SaaS on EKS in such a way that it could be migrated to AKS or GKE, but it's still a ton of work for the plumbers. So the reason that AWS has this proliferation of ready-made services (and there are tons of them - try sitting an AWS professional certification) is that you'll generally use them in favour of deploying your own FOSS thing (even if it's "just a helm chart away"). Because running a database cluster (for example) is never as simple as just deploying it. Once your engineers decide to use Cognito, Lambda, Kinesis, Aurora instead of doing a DIY, you're locked in. Hell, it would even cost a fortune to simply download the data to close your account (because AWS Snowball doesn't have an egress option where they'll drive a few PB of your data to your data center in a semi-truck)

pid-1 5y ago

> This might happen, but Cloud vendors will fight tooth and nail to stop it from happening, They are failing badly IMO. Most developers I know hate the whole experience of using AWS. I can't complain much as I make good money by understanding their shit so others don't have to. That said, I always find amazing how one of the largest companies in the world does not a have a UI with happy paths for simple common cases. Most services are a hot mess of IAM, weird APIs, undocumented limitations and gotchas.

jhickok 5y ago
>They are failing badly IMO. Most developers I know hate the whole experience of using AWS. It doesn't have to be great, only better than the alternatives. I would argue most devs prefer the rocky experience of AWS to working with their own operations people on aging hardware.
- randcraw 5y ago
  For now, maybe. But if your customers hate you, yet only a little less than they hate your competitors, all it takes is one new cloudSP to enter your market who ISN'T hated to completely wipe out the commodity low end of your business. Maybe the major cloud players believe they can buy up new & unhated competitors before they can establish a loyal user base. That strategy has worked pretty well so far for the vendors of mobile computing -- which just happens to be the primary consumer of low end cloud services. So if mobile can be commodified some day (the way unix workstations were by Linux), maybe basic cloud services can be too?