[manquer]

Easy to say leave, the techinical lockin cloud service providers by design choose to have makes it impossible to leave .

AWS (and others) make egress costs insanely expensive for any startup to consider leaving with their data, also there is constant push to either not support open protocols or extend /expand them in ways making it hard to migrate a code base easily.

If the advise is to use only effectively use managed open source components then why AWS at all ? most competent mid sized teams can do that much cheaper with a colo providers like OVH/hetzner.

The point of investing in AWS is not outsource running base infra, if we should stay away from leveraging the kind of cloud native services us mere mortals cannot hope to build or maintain.

Also this avoid us-east-1 advice is bit frustrating, AWS does not have to experiment with new services always in the same region,it is not marked as experimental region or has reduced SLAs , if it is inferior/preview/beta than call it out in the UI and contract, what about when there is no choice? If cloudfront is managed in us-east-1 and we shouldnt now use it ? Why use the cloud then ?

if your engineering only discovers scale problems at us-east-1 along with customers perhaps something is wrong ? aws could limit new instances in that region and spread the load, playing with customers like this who are at your mercy just because you can is not nice.

Disney can afford to go down, or build their cloud, small companies don't have deep pockets to do either

[cherioo]

> AWS (and others) make egress costs insanely expensive for any startup to consider leaving with their data

I have seen this repeated many times, but don't understand it. Yes egress is expensive, but they are not THAT expensive compared to storage. S3 egress per GB is no more than 3x the price of storage, i.e. moving out just cost 3 month of storage cost (there's also API cost but that's not the one often mentioned).

Is egress pricing being a lock-in factor just a myth? Is there some other AWS cost I'm missing? Obviously there will be big architectural and engineering cost to move, but that's just part of life.

[bushbaba]

Often the other cloud vendors will assist in offering those migration costs as part of your contract negotiations.

But really, egress costs aren’t locking you in. It’s the hard coded AWS apis, terraform scripts and technical debt. Having to change all of that and refactor and reoptimize to a different providers infrastructure is a huge endeavor. That time spent night have a higher ROI being put elsewhere

[manquer]

3months is only if you use standard S3, However intelligent tiering , infrequent access , reduced redundancy or glacier instant can be substantially cheaper, without impacting retrieval time [1]

At scale when costs matter, you would have lifecycle policy tuned to your needs taking advantage of these classes. Any typical production workload is hardly paying only S3 base price for all/most of its storage needs, they will have mix of all these too.

[1] if there is substantial data in glacier regular, the costing completely blows through the roof, retrieval +egress makes it infeasible unless you activily hate AWS enough to spend that kind of money

[EnlightenedBro]

Lesson to build your services with Docker and Terraform. In this setup you can spin up a working clone of a decently sized stack in a different cloud provider in under an hour.

Don't lock yourself in.

[manquer]

If the setup is that portable you probably don't need the AWS at all in the first place.

If your use only services built and managed by your docker images why use the cloud in the first place ? It would be cheaper to host on a smaller vendor , the reliability is not substantially better with big cloud than tier two vendors, that difference between say OVH and AWS is not that valuable to most applications to be worth the premium.

In IMO, if you don't leverage cloud native services offered by GCP or AWS then cloud is not adding much value to your stack.

[rorymalcolm]

This is just not true for Terraform at all, they do not aim to be multi cloud and it is a much more usable product because of it. Resource parameters do not swap out directly across providers (rightly so, the abstractions they choose are different!).

[lysium]

...if you don't have much data, that is. Otherwise, you'll have huge egress costs.