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Who are these engineering suckers who are spending all of this dollar-labor on solutions YOU KNOW full well at every opportunity will they want to find a way to

Who are these engineering suckers who are spending all of this dollar-labor on solutions YOU KNOW full well at every opportunity will they want to find a way to lock you in, or to obscure engineering costs to you to make a deal look cheap, and then not knowing that leaving the lock-in costs more than writing a cloud independent solution to begin with? I blame this lazy attitude of not knowing how to use your tools and instead asking cloud providers to know how to do things for you. Every single time I see an engineering team fail to understand how to use their tools and do their homework, they take the easy and long-term expensive way out. Oh and by the way, those solutions engineers you talk to barely know any better either. You will STILL eventually have to learn how to actually use the infrastructure you chose. I write solutions for enterprises that are entirely independent of cloud specific offerings and then make sales engineers fight for volume business knowing they have no leverage. Oh, you price hiked on us without notice? We already had deployment scripts to move providers and perform db redirections same-day and had already gone through procurement with other providers for insurance. Oh darn. Guess you shouldn't screw around with your customers. As soon as you enter the pool, they WILL pull the ladder from you.

vasco 4y ago
> I blame this lazy attitude of not knowing how to use your tools and instead asking cloud providers to know how to do things for you. If you want to have such a strong attitude towards people who use Aurora instead of running Postgres on an EC2 instance maybe you should be collecting some silica sand instead of worrying about cross-cloud compatibility.
semicolon_storm 4y ago
If you fully believe this, why are you even using a cloud provider? Why not buy your own hardware and set up your own server racks? Of course it's because you agree on some level that DIY and "knowing how to use your tools and instead asking cloud providers to know how to do things for you" is simply not worth it. Companies who use these premium managed services are just setting the bar 1 level higher than you do. Even if these premium services end up costing $200K/year more than doing it yourself on commodity VMs, that's not even the salary of 1 FTE engineer at many companies. It's simply not worth the time and opportunity cost to care about those things if it's distracting engineers from working on the core product.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- rwalle 4y ago
  Yeah, I thought this conversation was open and shut many years ago and the business model of cloud provider is very clear.
hibikir 4y ago
It's typically people whose incentives in no way align with lowering long term costs for their organization. When you are building something new, the incentives are often on speed of delivery, plus whatever you can learn for yourself. Evaluating whether you'd be saving a lot of money 3 years from now is something that't rarely going to lead to raises or bonuses. You might not even be working at the same place by the time the problem is visible. And even if you do, it's often far better for yourself to build something that will catch fire and then put it out than to build something better in the first place. This happens in basically every organization out there, even in the best ones. I've saved millions a month in AWS costs that came from decisions of people that are major tech leaders today. The original architect is now a CEO in a company you know, and I looked great for my efforts: Everyone won, other than the largest shareholders, who weren't looking into the decisions at all, as they had bigger fish to fry. If incentives are such that the extra effort to be more cloud portable are useless to the person spending the effort, of course they are going to be "lazy". I've never worked at a place where I couldn't massively cut hardware or cloud costs by trying a little bit. It's just rarely been something that was anywhere near the top of the priority list.
- dilyevsky 4y ago
  We’ve been also living in a qe bubble for 15 years. While it doesn’t look like qt is gonna hold much longer we also probably unlikely to return in the “spend $$$ as fast as you can” mode for a while so we might see (actually already seeing) a resurgence of cloud expatriates

vasco 4y ago

> I blame this lazy attitude of not knowing how to use your tools and instead asking cloud providers to know how to do things for you. If you want to have such a strong attitude towards people who use Aurora instead of running Postgres on an EC2 instance maybe you should be collecting some silica sand instead of worrying about cross-cloud compatibility.

semicolon_storm 4y ago

If you fully believe this, why are you even using a cloud provider? Why not buy your own hardware and set up your own server racks? Of course it's because you agree on some level that DIY and "knowing how to use your tools and instead asking cloud providers to know how to do things for you" is simply not worth it. Companies who use these premium managed services are just setting the bar 1 level higher than you do. Even if these premium services end up costing $200K/year more than doing it yourself on commodity VMs, that's not even the salary of 1 FTE engineer at many companies. It's simply not worth the time and opportunity cost to care about those things if it's distracting engineers from working on the core product.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
rwalle 4y ago
Yeah, I thought this conversation was open and shut many years ago and the business model of cloud provider is very clear.

hibikir 4y ago

It's typically people whose incentives in no way align with lowering long term costs for their organization. When you are building something new, the incentives are often on speed of delivery, plus whatever you can learn for yourself. Evaluating whether you'd be saving a lot of money 3 years from now is something that't rarely going to lead to raises or bonuses. You might not even be working at the same place by the time the problem is visible. And even if you do, it's often far better for yourself to build something that will catch fire and then put it out than to build something better in the first place. This happens in basically every organization out there, even in the best ones. I've saved millions a month in AWS costs that came from decisions of people that are major tech leaders today. The original architect is now a CEO in a company you know, and I looked great for my efforts: Everyone won, other than the largest shareholders, who weren't looking into the decisions at all, as they had bigger fish to fry. If incentives are such that the extra effort to be more cloud portable are useless to the person spending the effort, of course they are going to be "lazy". I've never worked at a place where I couldn't massively cut hardware or cloud costs by trying a little bit. It's just rarely been something that was anywhere near the top of the priority list.

dilyevsky 4y ago
We’ve been also living in a qe bubble for 15 years. While it doesn’t look like qt is gonna hold much longer we also probably unlikely to return in the “spend $$$ as fast as you can” mode for a while so we might see (actually already seeing) a resurgence of cloud expatriates