[CivBase]

All content is "objectionable" depending on the audience. We just have to trust our new Amazon overlords.

I like AWS and the general concept of cloud computing, but I'm extremely concerned about how difficult it appears to be to transition from one solution to another. As someone working on an AWS app, I'm worried about the possible day where my employer announces that we're moving everything to Azure or some other platform.

The lack of compatibility between cloud computing platforms makes it difficult to switch when issues like this come up. I suspect in most cases, it's just more economical to stick with the current provider and hope you aren't impacted in the future. Because of that, I doubt providers like Amazon see much immediate impact from things like this.

[simple_phrases]

These are the reasons that I refuse to build any of my projects on some cloud provider's special snowflake solutions.

[tlrobinson]

You mean this? https://aws.amazon.com/solutionspace/financial-services/solu...

[simple_phrases]

Haha, no I didn't mean that service in particular. I was using 'special snowflake solution' as a derogatory term for the branded and managed services that cloud providers sell.

[tlrobinson]

Sorry, I should have made it clear I was joking :)

[simple_phrases]

I figured but you never know. Sarcasm doesn't translate well over the internet.

[edoceo]

I think they mean custom/managed+locked-in solution.

EG: I can move HA PG to any provider but if I build around RDS specific tooling I'm boxed in and any migrations are OOM harder.

[jedberg]

I hear this a lot, but it's a silly argument. Lock-in doesn't come from using the special services. It comes from your data being hard to move.

Before I moved reddit from a datacenter to AWS, I was "locked in" to my datacenter. It took weeks to get all the data out and into AWS.

Working around their special services isn't all that hard. Nothing AWS offers is that hard to replicate outside of AWS if you want to. The hard part is getting your data out.

So if you're going to put all your data into AWS anyway, you might as well use their services and save yourself some time and effort reinventing what they've already done. If you really need to move out later, then make the investment in rebuilding the tools they offer.

[ajhurliman]

There's always https://www.terraform.io/ to guard against vendor lock-in, but then you're still stuck with another vendor if you decide to switch.

[NewsAware]

Moving a TerraForm managed infrastructure, which has higher complexity than one ec2 instance, to another provider basically means rewriting most TerraForm code. I don't see TF to lower the barrier of vendor lockin really.

[kakwa_]

Completely agree, Terraform doesn't abstract away the cloud specific bits, it pretty much exposes the raw resources.

Terraform is "multi provider" not "provider agnostic".

[braindongle]

Cloud portability? Containerization if your app isn't built with serverless in mind, serverless if it is. Is there anything snowflake-y about the Big Three's offerings for container orchestration and true serverless?

And for not-infrastructure cloud services, aren't they pretty interchangeable? I recently evaluated four different cloud speech-to-text services. Sure the APIs differed, but you know, it's an API call. I see nothing to complain about.

[moksly]

Even if you don’t use the special snowflakes, you’re still in a Linux vs Windows sort of world where your AWS skills won’t apply to Azure if you’re working on the operations and security parts.

[monoideism]

Most Azure cloud computing customers use Linux:

https://build5nines.com/linux-is-most-used-os-in-microsoft-a...

[moksly]

That was really not my point, my point is that once you’re a wizard in azure operations those skills won’t transfer to AWS. Similarly to how a windows admin can’t automatically use his/her skills as a Linux sysadmin and vice versa.

Maybe the switch isn’t too bad for small customers, but in enterprise where people spend years specialising and obtaining and renewing certificates you can’t just transfer your staff members between the cloud services without a major retraining investment, in which you’ll likely loose your best staff because there is a reason they chose to spend all those years on your previous service.

[monoideism]

I see. Given that Azure offers both Linux and Windows server environments, your analogy was a little unclear to me.

Ideally, this particular challenge can be overcome using something like terraform, which allows you to build infrastructure in a relatively cloud-agnostic way. But even that is a risk, since it's a relatively new project.

[type0]

There's also this snowflake flying around ->

https://cri-o.io/