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We did our research, and settled on the French cloud provider that fit our parameters. They made promises about support hours that they did not keep. Changing

We did our research, and settled on the French cloud provider that fit our parameters. They made promises about support hours that they did not keep. Changing cloud service providers is not cheap. We were a small team, and this cost us lots of effort. We didn't fork our code, we forked our services. We ran everything on Azure. Then we had to configure our kiosk devices to either talk to Azure, or to talk to our servers in France. "Did you write your service to use proprietary Azure APIs without regard to vendor lock-in? Why not take this as an opportunity" I'm sorry, do you have any idea of the cost of doing these things? If you have 6 developers, total, how many of them are you willing to allocate to rewriting your stack, so that you can sell your product in Europe?

cpeterso 5y ago
Do cloud service providers like Azure not have a way to "pin" some of your service instances to servers in specific countries? Seems like this capability would be important differentiating feature given EU privacy laws about where user data is hosted.
- seszett 5y ago
  They do, in fact Azure is totally compatible with French law for handling private data. Many large companies use it.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
javajosh 5y ago
>I'm sorry, do you have any idea of the cost of doing these things? Oh indeed yes, which is why for years now I've been warning people to not write to proprietary APIs in the first place. It's a faustian bargain and sooner or later the bill is going to come due! If not because of legal requirements, then because MS or Amazon saturates the market, and has to increase revenue somehow. This is an example of where an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. The upshot is that ignoring the warnings of people like me was a mistake. (It's funny how people have moaned for years about "vendor lock-in" WRT Oracle. "They charge for every core!" But the cloud providers charge for every invocation, which is infinitely worse. And yet no-one seems to worry about it. It's really odd.)
- VikingCoder 5y ago
  So yeah, using HTTP to connect to a server that happened to be in the US... That's the thing that prevented us from selling in France. But thanks for lecturing me that "vendor lock in" was what killed our 6-developer team that was developing hardware, and computer vision, and 3D computer graphics, while developing a health care product under the tons of regulation that comes with that. Your arrogance is just stunning.
  - javajosh 5y ago
    Hey, I feel your pain. Companies are like children to a founder, and you have described the heroic acts you've taken to save your child. It absolutely sucks to be in your position. I think it's important to warn "parents" (or future parents) to avoid this particular tragedy, which I think is quite avoidable. I want to encourage people to question the orthodoxy around cloud, that everyone is doing it so its fine, and worse is better anyway, yada yada. It may be insensitive to use your situation to illustrate the downside of cloud vendor lock-in, but my motivation is not to look down on you, but to warn others about this very real, very painful outcome that they court when they make the popular choice.
    - VikingCoder 5y ago
      I wasn't a founder. I was one of the 6 developers. We happened to not use any vendor-specific APIs. And it still killed us to fork our stack, and to teach our kiosks to be able to talk to the right server, and the extra cost of the servers in France, and the lack of support we saw from the provider in France...
      - hda2 5y ago
        Would you reconsider naming the provider?
      - salawat 5y ago
        Many noble efforts fail this way. You are not alone. This is one of those lessons you learn in regards to keeping your audience narrow, and executing on one thing at a time. It's embittering, hardens the heart, and makes you want to give up, but you've gotta redouble and bust through it. And by all means, shame the provider if they didn't live up to their end of the bargain.

cpeterso 5y ago

Do cloud service providers like Azure not have a way to "pin" some of your service instances to servers in specific countries? Seems like this capability would be important differentiating feature given EU privacy laws about where user data is hosted.

seszett 5y ago
They do, in fact Azure is totally compatible with French law for handling private data. Many large companies use it.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

javajosh 5y ago

>I'm sorry, do you have any idea of the cost of doing these things? Oh indeed yes, which is why for years now I've been warning people to not write to proprietary APIs in the first place. It's a faustian bargain and sooner or later the bill is going to come due! If not because of legal requirements, then because MS or Amazon saturates the market, and has to increase revenue somehow. This is an example of where an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. The upshot is that ignoring the warnings of people like me was a mistake. (It's funny how people have moaned for years about "vendor lock-in" WRT Oracle. "They charge for every core!" But the cloud providers charge for every invocation, which is infinitely worse. And yet no-one seems to worry about it. It's really odd.)

VikingCoder 5y ago
So yeah, using HTTP to connect to a server that happened to be in the US... That's the thing that prevented us from selling in France. But thanks for lecturing me that "vendor lock in" was what killed our 6-developer team that was developing hardware, and computer vision, and 3D computer graphics, while developing a health care product under the tons of regulation that comes with that. Your arrogance is just stunning.
- javajosh 5y ago
  Hey, I feel your pain. Companies are like children to a founder, and you have described the heroic acts you've taken to save your child. It absolutely sucks to be in your position. I think it's important to warn "parents" (or future parents) to avoid this particular tragedy, which I think is quite avoidable. I want to encourage people to question the orthodoxy around cloud, that everyone is doing it so its fine, and worse is better anyway, yada yada. It may be insensitive to use your situation to illustrate the downside of cloud vendor lock-in, but my motivation is not to look down on you, but to warn others about this very real, very painful outcome that they court when they make the popular choice.
  - VikingCoder 5y ago
    I wasn't a founder. I was one of the 6 developers. We happened to not use any vendor-specific APIs. And it still killed us to fork our stack, and to teach our kiosks to be able to talk to the right server, and the extra cost of the servers in France, and the lack of support we saw from the provider in France...
    - hda2 5y ago
      Would you reconsider naming the provider?
    - salawat 5y ago
      Many noble efforts fail this way. You are not alone. This is one of those lessons you learn in regards to keeping your audience narrow, and executing on one thing at a time. It's embittering, hardens the heart, and makes you want to give up, but you've gotta redouble and bust through it. And by all means, shame the provider if they didn't live up to their end of the bargain.