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As someone who loves EC2 (and happens to work for Amazon, but in a different domain), I can't figure out why people/companies haven't moved towards Hybrid Cloud

As someone who loves EC2 (and happens to work for Amazon, but in a different domain), I can't figure out why people/companies haven't moved towards Hybrid Clouds. There are several strengths and weaknesses of the various providers, and the reward-to-risk ratio of locking yourself into one platform is just too small to matter. There are several scenarios where I could see myself using a combination of Rackspace + EC2 + Linode + colocation. A little puppet/chef knowledge goes a long way.

trotsky 13y ago
I can't quite parse what you're saying about the reward to risk level being too low for lock in, but having worked with a number of startups that were 100% aws and paying dearly for it thge lock in was their major problem - ec2 ancillary private branded or unique services all seem to be designed with lock in being the number one goal. From what I've seen the first acknowledgment of lock in seems to open the flood gate, kind of a well if we're already "stuck" we might as well use this proprietary feature that will save us 10% in build time. Not the smartest approach, but no one accuses most web startups of being in the long game.
- saosebastiao 13y ago
  I know of a few people that say that there are benefits to sticking to one platform...that there is less maintenance and lower friction from the "one stop shop" setups that you get on App Engine or Heroku or AWS. I'm just saying those benefits are tiny in comparison to the risks of lock in.
acdha 13y ago
The crazy part is that so far at the Amazon sales events I've attended the AWS staff frequently repeated the recommendation that you buy dedicated iron for your 24x7 workload and use EC2 for bursty jobs, usually pushing VPC as the way to tie everything together.
admbk 13y ago
Most organizations when they try to use AWS or Rackspace as a mere extension of their datacenter - discover that is quite hard, and that their apps require extensive redesign to fit the new environment. This in turn leads to the lock-in and lack of flexibility. I think this blog post touches on the phenomenon: http://www.ravellosystems.com/blog/the-unbearable-lightness-of-cloud-lock-in/ http://www.ravellosystems.com/blog/the-unbearable-lightness-...

trotsky 13y ago

I can't quite parse what you're saying about the reward to risk level being too low for lock in, but having worked with a number of startups that were 100% aws and paying dearly for it thge lock in was their major problem - ec2 ancillary private branded or unique services all seem to be designed with lock in being the number one goal. From what I've seen the first acknowledgment of lock in seems to open the flood gate, kind of a well if we're already "stuck" we might as well use this proprietary feature that will save us 10% in build time. Not the smartest approach, but no one accuses most web startups of being in the long game.

saosebastiao 13y ago
I know of a few people that say that there are benefits to sticking to one platform...that there is less maintenance and lower friction from the "one stop shop" setups that you get on App Engine or Heroku or AWS. I'm just saying those benefits are tiny in comparison to the risks of lock in.

acdha 13y ago

The crazy part is that so far at the Amazon sales events I've attended the AWS staff frequently repeated the recommendation that you buy dedicated iron for your 24x7 workload and use EC2 for bursty jobs, usually pushing VPC as the way to tie everything together.

admbk 13y ago

Most organizations when they try to use AWS or Rackspace as a mere extension of their datacenter - discover that is quite hard, and that their apps require extensive redesign to fit the new environment. This in turn leads to the lock-in and lack of flexibility. I think this blog post touches on the phenomenon: http://www.ravellosystems.com/blog/the-unbearable-lightness-of-cloud-lock-in/ http://www.ravellosystems.com/blog/the-unbearable-lightness-...