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The complexity is what gets you. One of AWS's favorite situations is 1) Senior engineer starts on AWS 2) Senior engineer leaves because our industry does not

The complexity is what gets you. One of AWS's favorite situations is 1) Senior engineer starts on AWS 2) Senior engineer leaves because our industry does not value longevity or loyalty at all whatsoever (not saying it should, just observing that it doesn't) 3) New engineer comes in and panics 4) Ends up using a "managed service" to relieve the panic 5) New engineer leaves 6) Second new engineer comes in and not only panics but outright needs help 7) Paired with some "certified AWS partner" who claims to help "reduce cost" but who actually gets a kickback from the extra spend they induce (usually 10% if I'm not mistaken) Calling it it ransomware is obviously hyperbolic but there are definitely some parallels one could draw On top of it all, AWS pricing is about to massively go up due to the RAM price increase. There's no way it can't since AWS is over half of Amazon's profit while only around 15% of its revenue.

infecto 8mo ago
It’s all anecdotal but in my experiences it’s usually opposite. Bored senior engineer wants to use something new and picks a AWS bespoke service for a new project. I am sure it happens a multitude of ways but I have never seen the case you are describing.
- alpinisme 8mo ago
  I’ve seen your case more than the ransom scenario too. But also even more often: early-to-mid-career dev saw a cloud pattern trending online, heard it was a new “best practice,” and so needed to find a way to move their company to using it.
- walt_grata 8mo ago
  Is that what I should be doing? I'm just encouraging the devs on my team to read designing data intensive apps and setting up time for group discussions. Aside from coding and meetings that is.
- asimeqi 8mo ago
  Since when is "bored" a synonym for "dishonest"?
  - infecto 8mo ago
    Please elaborate. Such a bold statement with zero logic around it.
coliveira 8mo ago
The end result of all this is that the percentage of people who know how to implement systems without AWS/Azure will be a single digit. From that point on, this will be the only "economic" way, it doesn't matter what the prices are.
- couscouspie 8mo ago
  That's not a factual statement over reality, but more of a normative judgement to justify resignation. Yes, professionals that know how to actually do these things are not abundantly available, but available enough to achieve the transition. The talent exists and is absolutely passionate about software freedom and hence highly intrinsically motivated to work on it. The only thing that is lacking so far is the demand and the talent available will skyrocket, when the market starts demanding it.
  - bix6 8mo ago
    > The only thing that is lacking so far is the demand and the talent available will skyrocket, when the market starts demanding it. But will the market demand it? AWS just continues to grow.
    - bluGill 8mo ago
      Only time will tell. It depends on when someone with a MBA starts asking questions about cloud spending and runs the real numbers. People promoting self hosting often are not counting all the cost of self hosting (AWS has people working 24x7 so that if something fails someone is there to take action)
      - 4nonverbal-alit 8mo ago
        From what I've seen, if you're depending on AWS, if something fails you too need someone 24x7 so that you can take action as well. Sometimes magic happens and systems recover after aws restarts their DNS, but usually the combination of event causes the application to get into an unrecoverable state that you need manual action. It doesn't always happen but you need someone to be there if it ever happens. Or bare minimum you need to evaluate if the underlying issue is really caused by AWS or something else has to be done on top of waiting for them to fix.
antonvs 8mo ago
> 3) New engineer comes in and panics > 4) Ends up using a "managed service" to relieve the panic It's not as though this is unique to cloud. I've seen multiple managers come in and introduce some SaaS because it fills a gap in their own understanding and abilities. Then when they leave, everyone stops using it and the account is cancelled. The difference with cloud is that it tends to be more central to the operation, so can't just be canceled when an advocate leaves.
Aurornis 8mo ago
One of the biggest problems with the self-hosted situations I’ve seen is when the senior engineers who set it up leave and the next generation has to figure out how to run it all. In theory with perfect documentation they’d have a good head start to learn it, but there is always a lot of unwritten knowledge involved in managing an inherited setup. With AWS the knowledge is at least transferable and you can find people who have worked with that exact thing before. Engineers also leave for a lot of reasons. Even highly paid engineers go off and retire, change to a job for more novelty, or decide to try starting their own business.
- ethbr1 8mo ago
  There are many great developers who are not also SREs. Building and operating/maintaining have their different mindsets.
- strobe 8mo ago
  >With AWS the knowledge is at least transferable unfortunately it lot of things in AWS that also could be messed up so it might be really hard to research what is going on. For example, you could have hundreds of Lambdas running without any idea where original sources and how they connected to each-other, or complex VPCs network routing where some rules and security groups shared randomly between services so if you do small change it could lead to completely difference service to degrade (like you were hired to help with service X but after you changes some service Y went down and you even not aware that it existed)
  - Hikikomori 8mo ago
    Not much different from how it worked in companies I used to work for. Except the situation was even worse as we had no api or UI to probe for information.
- Breza 8mo ago
  In my experience, a back end on the cloud isn't necessarily any less complex than something self hosted.
antonvs 8mo ago
> One of AWS's favorite situations I'll give you an alternative scenario, which IME is more realistic. I'm a software developer, and I've worked at several companies, big and small and in-between, with poor to abysmal IT/operations. I've introduced and/or advocated cloud at all of them. The idea that it's "more expensive" is nonsense in these situations. Calculate the cost of the IT/operations incompetence, and the cost of the slowness of getting anything done, and cloud is cheap. Extremely cheap. Not only that, it can increase shipping velocity, and enable all kinds of important capabilities that the business otherwise just wouldn't have, or would struggle to implement. Much of the "cloud so expensive" crowd are just engineers too narrowly focused on a small part of the picture, or in denial about their ability to compete with the competence of cloud providers.
- acdha 8mo ago
  > Much of the "cloud so expensive" crowd are just engineers too narrowly focused on a small part of the picture, or in denial about their ability to compete with the competence of cloud providers This has been my experience as well. There are legitimate points of criticism but every time I’ve seen someone try to make that argument it’s been comparing significantly different levels of service (e.g. a storage comparison equating S3 with tape) or leaving out entire categories of cost like the time someone tried to say their bare metal costs for a two server database cluster was comparable to RDS despite not even having things like power or backups.
  - Symbiote 8mo ago
    You are welcome to criticise my DB cluster comparison: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46910521 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46910521
    - acdha 8mo ago
      That leaves out staffing, backups, development and testing of a multi-location failover mechanism as robust as the RDS one, and a bunch of security compliance work if that’s relevant. It’s totally possible to beat AWS and volume is the way to do it–your admin’s salary doesn’t scale be linearly with storage–but every time I’ve tried to account for all of the costs it’s been close enough that it’s made sense to put people on things which can’t be outsourced.
themafia 8mo ago
> 7) Paired with some "certified AWS partner" What do you think RedHat support contracts are? This situation exists in every technology stack in existence.

infecto 8mo ago

It’s all anecdotal but in my experiences it’s usually opposite. Bored senior engineer wants to use something new and picks a AWS bespoke service for a new project. I am sure it happens a multitude of ways but I have never seen the case you are describing.

alpinisme 8mo ago
I’ve seen your case more than the ransom scenario too. But also even more often: early-to-mid-career dev saw a cloud pattern trending online, heard it was a new “best practice,” and so needed to find a way to move their company to using it.
walt_grata 8mo ago
Is that what I should be doing? I'm just encouraging the devs on my team to read designing data intensive apps and setting up time for group discussions. Aside from coding and meetings that is.
asimeqi 8mo ago
Since when is "bored" a synonym for "dishonest"?
- infecto 8mo ago
  Please elaborate. Such a bold statement with zero logic around it.

coliveira 8mo ago

The end result of all this is that the percentage of people who know how to implement systems without AWS/Azure will be a single digit. From that point on, this will be the only "economic" way, it doesn't matter what the prices are.

couscouspie 8mo ago
That's not a factual statement over reality, but more of a normative judgement to justify resignation. Yes, professionals that know how to actually do these things are not abundantly available, but available enough to achieve the transition. The talent exists and is absolutely passionate about software freedom and hence highly intrinsically motivated to work on it. The only thing that is lacking so far is the demand and the talent available will skyrocket, when the market starts demanding it.
- bix6 8mo ago
  > The only thing that is lacking so far is the demand and the talent available will skyrocket, when the market starts demanding it. But will the market demand it? AWS just continues to grow.
  - bluGill 8mo ago
    Only time will tell. It depends on when someone with a MBA starts asking questions about cloud spending and runs the real numbers. People promoting self hosting often are not counting all the cost of self hosting (AWS has people working 24x7 so that if something fails someone is there to take action)
    - 4nonverbal-alit 8mo ago
      From what I've seen, if you're depending on AWS, if something fails you too need someone 24x7 so that you can take action as well. Sometimes magic happens and systems recover after aws restarts their DNS, but usually the combination of event causes the application to get into an unrecoverable state that you need manual action. It doesn't always happen but you need someone to be there if it ever happens. Or bare minimum you need to evaluate if the underlying issue is really caused by AWS or something else has to be done on top of waiting for them to fix.

antonvs 8mo ago

> 3) New engineer comes in and panics > 4) Ends up using a "managed service" to relieve the panic It's not as though this is unique to cloud. I've seen multiple managers come in and introduce some SaaS because it fills a gap in their own understanding and abilities. Then when they leave, everyone stops using it and the account is cancelled. The difference with cloud is that it tends to be more central to the operation, so can't just be canceled when an advocate leaves.

Aurornis 8mo ago

One of the biggest problems with the self-hosted situations I’ve seen is when the senior engineers who set it up leave and the next generation has to figure out how to run it all. In theory with perfect documentation they’d have a good head start to learn it, but there is always a lot of unwritten knowledge involved in managing an inherited setup. With AWS the knowledge is at least transferable and you can find people who have worked with that exact thing before. Engineers also leave for a lot of reasons. Even highly paid engineers go off and retire, change to a job for more novelty, or decide to try starting their own business.

ethbr1 8mo ago
There are many great developers who are not also SREs. Building and operating/maintaining have their different mindsets.
strobe 8mo ago
>With AWS the knowledge is at least transferable unfortunately it lot of things in AWS that also could be messed up so it might be really hard to research what is going on. For example, you could have hundreds of Lambdas running without any idea where original sources and how they connected to each-other, or complex VPCs network routing where some rules and security groups shared randomly between services so if you do small change it could lead to completely difference service to degrade (like you were hired to help with service X but after you changes some service Y went down and you even not aware that it existed)
- Hikikomori 8mo ago
  Not much different from how it worked in companies I used to work for. Except the situation was even worse as we had no api or UI to probe for information.
Breza 8mo ago
In my experience, a back end on the cloud isn't necessarily any less complex than something self hosted.

antonvs 8mo ago

> One of AWS's favorite situations I'll give you an alternative scenario, which IME is more realistic. I'm a software developer, and I've worked at several companies, big and small and in-between, with poor to abysmal IT/operations. I've introduced and/or advocated cloud at all of them. The idea that it's "more expensive" is nonsense in these situations. Calculate the cost of the IT/operations incompetence, and the cost of the slowness of getting anything done, and cloud is cheap. Extremely cheap. Not only that, it can increase shipping velocity, and enable all kinds of important capabilities that the business otherwise just wouldn't have, or would struggle to implement. Much of the "cloud so expensive" crowd are just engineers too narrowly focused on a small part of the picture, or in denial about their ability to compete with the competence of cloud providers.

acdha 8mo ago
> Much of the "cloud so expensive" crowd are just engineers too narrowly focused on a small part of the picture, or in denial about their ability to compete with the competence of cloud providers This has been my experience as well. There are legitimate points of criticism but every time I’ve seen someone try to make that argument it’s been comparing significantly different levels of service (e.g. a storage comparison equating S3 with tape) or leaving out entire categories of cost like the time someone tried to say their bare metal costs for a two server database cluster was comparable to RDS despite not even having things like power or backups.
- Symbiote 8mo ago
  You are welcome to criticise my DB cluster comparison: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46910521 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46910521
  - acdha 8mo ago
    That leaves out staffing, backups, development and testing of a multi-location failover mechanism as robust as the RDS one, and a bunch of security compliance work if that’s relevant. It’s totally possible to beat AWS and volume is the way to do it–your admin’s salary doesn’t scale be linearly with storage–but every time I’ve tried to account for all of the costs it’s been close enough that it’s made sense to put people on things which can’t be outsourced.

themafia 8mo ago

> 7) Paired with some "certified AWS partner" What do you think RedHat support contracts are? This situation exists in every technology stack in existence.