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> What happened? I used to work at a company that payed for Datadog. They seemed like a great business; they gave you an observability layer in exchange for a

> What happened? I used to work at a company that payed for Datadog. They seemed like a great business; they gave you an observability layer in exchange for a monthly fee. Great for a growing business, up until they started raising the prices and harassing our people with their sales team desperately begging for us to expand our package. I kid you not, after a few years of this the startup I worked for was paying Datadog more money per-month than the highest-paid salaries on the team. For graphs, we could show to executives. Later we switched to Promethius/Grafana and got the same functionality for pennies on the dollar. My guess is that HN got their just-deserts; we spent the past 10-odd years enjoying a "disruptive" market that mostly created more problems for us. Now, everyone is realizing it's a raw deal. Startups and big businesses don't want to buy Software-as-a-Service if they're only going to extort their B2B patronage. Users don't want any more subscriptions and loathe the fact that modern technology resembles cable TV packages so closely. Developers are either ideologically committed to fixing a problem or ideologically committed to being paid; the overlap between these two attitudes has been grossly over-marketed. When the dust settles, the brilliant expectation of competition in an unregulated market has not been realized in America. The most important and innovative flagship businesses are entirely stagnant, or even artificially walled-off from competition.

silverquiet 2y ago
I've been a cloud skeptic for over a decade and I've essentially been wondering the whole time if the Emperor is wearing any clothes. There are niches where cloud is pretty cool, but the push to move all infrastructure to the cloud seems like a mix of good marketing on the part of providers and a lot of hype/resume-driven development. But once you've put all your infrastructure and data into someone else's control, you've handed them a powerful lever over you, and to think that they won't use that to extract every dollar they can is rather naive.
- talldayo 2y ago
  I look at it in basically the other direction, though I agree that the outcomes of a cloud-dominated industry are still bad. The Internet favors development velocity over everything else; the faster you get your product out, the faster you succeed. Pretty much any cloud infrastructure could be colocated or hosted on-prem with enough dedicated engineers setting it all up, but the constraint will always be velocity. That's why hyperscalars are popular and refuse to budge even with good self-hosting options like Oxide. People that eschew the flexibility of the cloud end up struggling with far more problems than their effort is worth. It's still worth being skeptical of it all, but I feel like it's a post-cloud world and we're all just living in it. Online businesses suck now because they have to be more paranoid and insidious than their cloud providers are to them.

silverquiet 2y ago

I've been a cloud skeptic for over a decade and I've essentially been wondering the whole time if the Emperor is wearing any clothes. There are niches where cloud is pretty cool, but the push to move all infrastructure to the cloud seems like a mix of good marketing on the part of providers and a lot of hype/resume-driven development. But once you've put all your infrastructure and data into someone else's control, you've handed them a powerful lever over you, and to think that they won't use that to extract every dollar they can is rather naive.

talldayo 2y ago
I look at it in basically the other direction, though I agree that the outcomes of a cloud-dominated industry are still bad. The Internet favors development velocity over everything else; the faster you get your product out, the faster you succeed. Pretty much any cloud infrastructure could be colocated or hosted on-prem with enough dedicated engineers setting it all up, but the constraint will always be velocity. That's why hyperscalars are popular and refuse to budge even with good self-hosting options like Oxide. People that eschew the flexibility of the cloud end up struggling with far more problems than their effort is worth. It's still worth being skeptical of it all, but I feel like it's a post-cloud world and we're all just living in it. Online businesses suck now because they have to be more paranoid and insidious than their cloud providers are to them.