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I think, Simon Warldley summarised it good today. (0) They (think, they) have a niche use-case which is a bad fit for the cloud. These niche use-cases exist,

• dijit 4y ago
  > These niche use-cases exist, but they are niche, and most companies, who think their use-case is that niche so it doesn't fit the cloud,are probably wrong. Conversely: I find that the inverse is true very often. People are very quick to throw their current systems away in favour of the cloud due to a myriad of reasons; be it sticker shock, promise of less headcount, the idea that you can hire people easier or simply because of a Gartner report that your CTO happened to read on a flight. This causes migrations to the cloud that kinda don’t make sense, they’re borne out of ideology or “not being left behind” and sometimes it fails catastrophically. We would do well not to cargo cult, but reasonably deduce and argue what our objectives truly are.
  • mey 4y ago
    I wonder how many companies have been crippled by executives/managers reading Gartner reports. That's probably a business study unto itself.
    • dopylitty 4y ago
      A couple years into my career I came to the realization that working in the tech side of a non-tech business is not necessarily about providing what the business needs. It’s about convincing the business to pay for what you want for your own reasons (resume, prestige, continued employment ) I have been on many teams that could’ve easily been in maintenance mode and not changed anything for years. The business would’ve hummed along stably and profitably. But it’s hard to justify your job in IT if you say your roadmap is to just keep doing what you’re doing. Nevermind the people in between business and IT who really contribute to neither. So we get these pendulum swings and huge projects (move everything to cloud, move everything back, make engineering do ops, make a dedicated ops team, micro segment everything, flat network everything) just so IT management can convince the business they’re providing some value. Gartner is the “independent” third party that allows IT folks and tech vendors to convince the business they are doing the right thing. And yeah I’m sure some of these pendulum swings have come at great cost to the business, even halting it entirely (SAP)
    • semicolon_storm 4y ago
      Some of Gartner’s analysis can be spot on, but god some of it is so bad I can’t help but cringe. Their recent push for low code/no code everywhere and calling this the “final decade of applications” is in the later category. There’s going to be mountain of companies going out of business in 5 years due to following Gartner’s low/no code advice.
      • notabee 4y ago
        Don't forget that the already beleaguered world of government IT also listens to Gartner. But government doesn't really go out of business when that bad advice leads to bad initiatives, it just becomes even more dysfunctional.
  • deleted 4y ago
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• machinekob 4y ago
  Just put everything in cloud, use closed-in vendor solutions and overpriced eager fees as its typical VC way to just burn money cause "developers cost more" (maybe in California). I was big cloud enjoyer in like 2016-20 but then some hacker news post open my eyes to the truth. They are trying to milk everyone and hook every possible person on some free credits then bump prices and get fat profits and ofc make as hard as possible getting out of the platform. I just don't care and move to smaller providers for VPS and database + cloudflare for dns and pseudo s3 (still in almost free tier).
• kortilla 4y ago
  Chances are you belong in the vast number of companies that have a very static workload and you should move to a few colos and be done with it.
  • snotrockets 4y ago
    otoh: very few workload are static. our world isn’t (circadian rhythm is a thing!) and this drives most of our systems not to be such.
    • kortilla 4y ago
      Static on a daily rolling average. You’ll be hemorrhaging money if you think moving to the cloud will save you money because you have a daily trough. The only places I’ve seen it work are: - massive seasonal demand with negligible usage during off-season (think TurboTax if it weren’t part of Intuit) - brand new product development where you don’t even know what you need yet or you are going through exponential growth that you can’t get ahead of. (This stage should only last like 6 months though)
      • snotrockets 4y ago
        You are doing measuring wrong (look at distributions, not a number), and moving to the cloud wrong (rearchitect with elasticity and serverless in mind, don’t just put it on instances). I was hoping those lessons would be a bit more common by now.
        • kortilla 4y ago
          You don’t understand how the vast majority of compute workloads pan out for regular businesses if you think “elasticity” has any relevance at all.
        • ReflectedImage 4y ago
          Well at a company I worked at, on the surface it looked like we only needed to be running compute 9 am - 8 pm. But nowadays, it runs full load 24/7 on the cloud. Turns out the after hours batch jobs are just as demanding. shrugs
• kortilla 4y ago
  That entire thread is just a dumpster fire of bad analysis. He dismisses everything that doesn’t fit “serverless” as a niche and doesn’t mention cost of maintenance, transition, or lock-in in serverless. It’s just a super lazy take from someone who likes to use serverless because he doesn’t like to maintain things. It’s essentially an argument to live in a hotel because they can do maintenance at scale better than you.
  • youngtaff 4y ago
    I think you underestimate Simon’s analysis… don’t forget he built some of the early PaaS / cloud providers And with his maps he’ll have analysed things quite effectively I might disagree with him on the EU but his technology analysis is usually bang on
    • darkwater 4y ago
      IDK the guy but the whole tone of the thread sounds like that he is biased/have some interest. If you go back 4 years in time, everything in 2022 was going to be serverless. Reality check: it didn't happen, the only "fad" that actually materialized for almost everybody is Kubernetes (which actually helps with going back to bare metal).
    • kortilla 4y ago
      > don’t forget he built some of the early PaaS / cloud providers No shit, taking advice from a car salesman on how often to buy cars and what cars to buy is about the dumbest thing you can do. His entire livelihood and career was built on selling this story that you need to pay others to run all of your infrastructure for you. He’s shilling IT illiteracy rather than pushing for more sustainable on-prem solutions.
      • youngtaff 4y ago
        Have you ever used something like Wardley Mapping to do the analysis? Most on-prem solutions I've seen aren't sustainable, massive Capex costs, teams of people that could be better used in other ways just to keep trivial things applications running
• dmitriid 4y ago
  The absolute vast majority of companies can run from the cheapest Digital Ocean droplet for an indefinitely long time. No cloud necessary.
• Veliladon 4y ago
  I don't think it's as niche as people want to believe. The monetization models of cloud compute is clearly having compute act as a loss leader. The real revenue is picked up on the borderline egregious egress charges which are, coincidentally I'm sure, the hardest thing to estimate. Every other provider needs to follow this same monetization because then their choices are the top line being an eye-popping figure or making no money.
• Beltalowda 4y ago
  > simply put their workloads in the cloud and be done with it I've worked all sorts of cloud environments for about ten years now, and with metal servers before that, and I'm not all that convinced that the cloud is saving all that much in terms of engineering effort. Or if it does, I haven't experienced it. Sure, no one gets woken up at 4AM because your server's disks are failing, but instead you get woken up at 4AM because all your cloud native infrastructure is doing $funky_stuff. And yeah, no need to install and maintain servers any more, but now you need to write a whole bunch of code to interface with all the cloud stuff and maintain that. Lots of open positions for k8s engineers "dev-ops" engineers to make all of that work. I run my stuff on Linode VPS's, which is "the cloud" as in "renting servers", but it's not "the cloud" as in all the "cloud native" stuff we have now. My experience is that sometimes the cloud makes things easy, and it makes things harder. On balance, it seems we just swapped one set of problems for another set of problems, and we haven't really gained all that much in the end. I don't think Hey is running a "niche edge case"; it seems fairly standard stuff to me. That Tweet comes off as quite dismissive.
  • jdoss 4y ago
    I felt the tweet thread was dismissive as well. Hey is running pretty standard Rails things IIRC and I wouldn't consider them niche. They like to make money and they know they can make more of it if they run on baremetal. I think more companies are going to move back to a more hybrid model of cloud + baremetal in the next 10 years. Especially the ones that need more power, flexibility, and cost savings from their infra. You nailed it on the head. The problems have just moved from one camp to another. We make our life easier because we can talk to an API to get our network, compute, and storage but the complexity in doing so has a pretty high price as well. The current devops trends are mindbogglingly complex compared to most of software that is getting deployed with them.
  • pclmulqdq 4y ago
    The tweet thread came off in the completely wrong way to me, and suggested that the person writing it was pretty ignorant about how software engineering actually works. Are you suggesting that everyone should be using [insert dev fad here] for all but a few special cases? Have you considered that sometimes (really, almost all the time) people run code that is more than 2 years old? Have you considered the costs of things like serverless when you have a reasonably constant load? I am a huge fan of cloud as a platform for time-shared server rentals. Cloud for "value added" products like serverless and whatever new database they cook up starts to get really funky and weird, in addition to being extremely expensive.
• bayraktar 4y ago
  These niche use-cases exist, but they are niche, and most companies, who think their use-case is that niche so it doesn't fit the cloud, are probably wrong. Talk about broad, sweeping statements. Care to substantiate?
• pojzon 4y ago
  Lift and shift proved itself to not work well. Its not cost efficient for vast majority of businesses with legacy software. To use cloud efficiently you have to build for it. Startups are much more efficient in that regard in comparison to monolithic applications running on premise.
• jordanbeiber 4y ago
  If you’ve got global consumers of services you build, and or need elastic scalability - sure. Or if you’re a really small company - sure. You should probably rely on SaaS mainly. I would say many companies fall outside of these categories though and could potentially both save money and gain performance staying on-prem. I know my current employer does, and we’re seriously looking at moving back to on-prem/co-lo.
• hinkley 4y ago
  > think their use-case is that niche so it doesn't fit the cloud, are probably wrong. My sentiment leans toward host your own for a number of reasons, but it's challenging to make good decisions. Can you trust the person who is telling you that you can do it? Their org chart goes away if they lose this argument, so of course you're going to hear from them how we can do this. If the team you have has been doing a decent job, maybe you should listen to them. If they've been doing a poor job, then you have to ask why they're suddenly going to be able to provide a level of service you haven't been enjoying for years. My company went through one of these fishtails. I think everybody is happier that we ended up in the cloud, even those of us who will only begrudgingly admit it. As I said in another thread, I think the Hype Cycle for The Cloud will at least give some orgs with a dysfunctional IT department an opportunity to clean house and then start over in a couple of years as informed consumers. Or find a new kind of service provider that distances itself from The Cloud salespitch.