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The trillion-dollar question is whether the slower growth rate is just a temporary blip, or the beginning of a paradigm shift. I don't think anyone knows for c

by cs702 4y ago

The trillion-dollar question is whether the slower growth rate is just a temporary blip, or the beginning of a paradigm shift. I don't think anyone knows for certain, but anecdotally, I have found there's (1) more skepticism about the cost savings promised by cloud providers and (2) a growing realization that the financial incentives of cloud providers are not aligned with those of customers. In the early days of cloud providers, their services were both easy-to-use and cost-effective for many growing companies. Now, cloud providers offer what I'd describe as a "giant hairball" of specialized services, built on top of other specialized services, built on top of yet other specialized services... such that no single person can comprehend all of them, let alone manage them cost-effectively. Moreover, as all these intertwined services become deeply entrenched in IT infrastructure, migrating away from them becomes incredibly disruptive. The more a customer is sucked and trapped inside those giant hairballs, the better for the cloud providers. To paraphrase the Dark Knight, cloud providers may have been the heroes at first, but they have lived long enough to become the villains.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
wongarsu 4y ago
I think AWS itself has actually eased up on the "cloud saves costs" story, shifting more to "be more agile in how you spend" (see for example [1]). Arguably one of their biggest advantages over regular hosting is that deploying resources is as far removed as possible from any mention of payments, thus skipping the procurement processes that usually occur in companies. That way around internal red tape keeps attracting large companies, and the free credits keep attracting startups. I don't think this dip is anything more than a readjustment to a post-pandemic world, where more happens offline and thus slightly less online. 1: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/latest/aws-overview/six-advantages-of-cloud-computing.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/latest/aws-overview/...
CharlesW 4y ago
I'm hearing you say "a large catalog of services can be hard to navigate" (true), "dependencies can be hard to manage" (true), and "dependencies can be hard to migrate away from" (true). What I'm missing is how these considerations make a platform a villain.
- cs702 4y ago
  Their incentives are not aligned with those of customers. For example, anecdotally I've heard that many cloud services are configured with (a) out-of-the-box defaults that make it deceptively easy to get bigger invoices than anyone ever expects, and (b) byzantine billing that makes it deceptively hard to figure out how to make those invoices smaller.
dehrmann 4y ago
> or the beginning of a paradigm shift Could just be reaching market saturation.
bane 4y ago
I agree with this. When organizations move their stuff into the cloud, they justify it as driving down complexity and reducing cost -- we don't need to rent space for a data center, hire people to build and maintain that stuff, and so on. But the costing models seem to assume that other burdens like billing and cost management will be handled by the current in-house team. Except the billing for cloud services is byzantine and entirely unpredictable. So the org hires new specialists to manage this, and then new IT folks to setup and run some kind of CMP, and then they end up in a confused cost spiral that nobody can really explain but it certainly isn't saving anything. The developers meanwhile really just appreciate all the prebuilt lego bits and relatively simple scaling which they could get in theory and on-prem, avoid the cost spiral, and get way better visibility into what costs what, where, and why. The cost models get even more wrong when the org tries to go multicloud because its like nobody who builds those models understands egress costs.
- pid-1 4y ago
  > Except the billing for cloud services is byzantine and entirely unpredictable. I think AWS is the biggest offender in this area, by not enabling per resource usage by default.
- CharlesW 4y ago
  Aren't all of these indictments of CTOs/COOs, rather than cloud providers?
  - bane 4y ago
    Yes. But I think in a sense, they're also somewhat handcuffed by the industry. Talent wants to work "in the cloud", and if you don't offer that you restrict your talent pool significantly. A big part of creating a desirable workplace is creating one in which people want to be hired into and in tech that really just means "the latest tech" regardless of it being a good idea or not. I think it's also part of the reason we're doing so little with so much in terms of efficient software. "The latest tech" also just means huge abstraction layers which eat up tons of compute but offer only easier development at the cost of much more expensive O&M. It's honestly part of the drive to the cloud as well as what we used to do on a few boxes with software written in C or a mainframe is now a scalable cloud architecture running mostly Python or some such.
codazoda 4y ago
Every time I look at cloud offerings I can’t help but remember, “there’s money in confusion”.

by cs702 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

wongarsu 4y ago

I think AWS itself has actually eased up on the "cloud saves costs" story, shifting more to "be more agile in how you spend" (see for example [1]). Arguably one of their biggest advantages over regular hosting is that deploying resources is as far removed as possible from any mention of payments, thus skipping the procurement processes that usually occur in companies. That way around internal red tape keeps attracting large companies, and the free credits keep attracting startups. I don't think this dip is anything more than a readjustment to a post-pandemic world, where more happens offline and thus slightly less online. 1: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/latest/aws-overview/six-advantages-of-cloud-computing.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/latest/aws-overview/...

CharlesW 4y ago

I'm hearing you say "a large catalog of services can be hard to navigate" (true), "dependencies can be hard to manage" (true), and "dependencies can be hard to migrate away from" (true). What I'm missing is how these considerations make a platform a villain.

cs702 4y ago
Their incentives are not aligned with those of customers. For example, anecdotally I've heard that many cloud services are configured with (a) out-of-the-box defaults that make it deceptively easy to get bigger invoices than anyone ever expects, and (b) byzantine billing that makes it deceptively hard to figure out how to make those invoices smaller.

dehrmann 4y ago

> or the beginning of a paradigm shift Could just be reaching market saturation.

bane 4y ago

I agree with this. When organizations move their stuff into the cloud, they justify it as driving down complexity and reducing cost -- we don't need to rent space for a data center, hire people to build and maintain that stuff, and so on. But the costing models seem to assume that other burdens like billing and cost management will be handled by the current in-house team. Except the billing for cloud services is byzantine and entirely unpredictable. So the org hires new specialists to manage this, and then new IT folks to setup and run some kind of CMP, and then they end up in a confused cost spiral that nobody can really explain but it certainly isn't saving anything. The developers meanwhile really just appreciate all the prebuilt lego bits and relatively simple scaling which they could get in theory and on-prem, avoid the cost spiral, and get way better visibility into what costs what, where, and why. The cost models get even more wrong when the org tries to go multicloud because its like nobody who builds those models understands egress costs.

pid-1 4y ago
> Except the billing for cloud services is byzantine and entirely unpredictable. I think AWS is the biggest offender in this area, by not enabling per resource usage by default.
CharlesW 4y ago
Aren't all of these indictments of CTOs/COOs, rather than cloud providers?
- bane 4y ago
  Yes. But I think in a sense, they're also somewhat handcuffed by the industry. Talent wants to work "in the cloud", and if you don't offer that you restrict your talent pool significantly. A big part of creating a desirable workplace is creating one in which people want to be hired into and in tech that really just means "the latest tech" regardless of it being a good idea or not. I think it's also part of the reason we're doing so little with so much in terms of efficient software. "The latest tech" also just means huge abstraction layers which eat up tons of compute but offer only easier development at the cost of much more expensive O&M. It's honestly part of the drive to the cloud as well as what we used to do on a few boxes with software written in C or a mainframe is now a scalable cloud architecture running mostly Python or some such.

codazoda 4y ago

Every time I look at cloud offerings I can’t help but remember, “there’s money in confusion”.