[dfgdfg34545456]

As my organisation migrates everything over to AWS I do find myself questioning what the costs will look like when it is all done and we are completely locked in. AWS/Google/Microsoft cloud services put you in the position of an almost completely captive customer. What large corporation would ever sign up to that?

[marcinzm]

> What large corporation would ever sign up to that?

Ones with the power to have some very nice contract terms put into place to mitigate downsides in the medium term. If it's a problem long term then that'll be the next CEOs problem and the current one will have cashed in their $50m check already.

Less cynically, for many of them it's either being captive to their barely working IT department or being captive to a decently more competent AWS. So they choose the one that will give them better features for less money in the medium term. They can't make their IT work better because it's a two sided monopoly. Only one client who is guaranteed to not leave (until AWS at least). That inherently and unavoidably creates horrible incentives.

[re-thc]

> for many of them it's either being captive to their barely working IT department or being captive to a decently more competent AWS.

It's more just being prone to sales tactics.

For the IT department you've seen everything - all the issues. You overlook the good parts.

For an external vendor you only hear about the good parts from the salesperson. They often over promise etc. You get told you'll save time and money, they can engage you with a consultant to help migrate etc until you realize no 1 has actually done the proper analysis and something doesn't work. There's going to be weeks/months of delay but by then you're already signed.

[marcinzm]

Fortune 500 executives aren't the idiots you think they are. Some are but most aren't and most are moving to cloud.

[mgaunard]

Large organizations are very inefficient, so much so that the inefficiency of the cloud is more efficient than them doing the work themselves.

[re-thc]

> so much so that the inefficiency of the cloud is more efficient than them doing the work themselves.

You jest. They just add so many "required" layers to the cloud to make it even worse. They create "frameworks", "controls", requirements, guidelines and this and that so that using the cloud is even more effort.

You used to request a server, get a login and be done. Now you have to deal with the cloud and a whole lot of confusion over what can and can't be done and request access to every small bit of detail.

[everforward]

That’s not new, it’s probably just shifting around who does it.

When I worked at a Fortune 500 company, that was me. I’d get a request for a server from a dev and have to fracture it into like 50 separate tickets. One to security to open up the firewall, one to storage to get disk space, one to the VM guys for CPU and RAM, a couple to the AD guys for a new group and user, etc, etc.

[anal_reactor]

The biggest powers of cloud are:

1. The blast radius of an incompetent employee is much smaller.

2. It's much easier to tick boxes for management purposes when using a standard service with a standard list of checkboxes rather than own solution.

[a012]

> 1. The blast radius of an incompetent employee is much smaller.

Doubt. Never underestimate the impact of an incompetent person, it could be a single credential leak burn down the company over noght.

[manishsharan]

>> What large corporation would ever sign up to that?

Speaking of the banking sector, we are migrating our workloads to the public cloud as it allows us to be nimble and responsive to business needs. And we are getting a highly resilient and robust IT infrastructure that we could not implement on our own without having a very high headcount and associated bureaucracy.

As long as you are not using proprietor technologies e.g DynamoDB or GCP Firebase etc., you stack can be migrated from one cloud to another. It wont be easy or painless but it wont be impossible either.

[re-thc]

> as it allows us to be nimble and responsive to business needs

Speaking of the banking sector, I doubt the server is what's slowing things down.

[wiether]

Thus the second sentence :

> that we could not implement on our own without having a very high headcount and associated bureaucracy

[re-thc]

> Thus the second sentence :

Thus, I rather they fix the real problem than outsourcing 1/2 of it. Without the servers the problem is still there - in DevOps, development, etc.

[throw156754228]

>It wont be easy or painless but it wont be impossible either.

With data egress costs, all the security infrastructure built up is all bespoke to a provider, not to mention engineers relearning the new provider's APIs and all its warts. The cost would be HUGE. Would be something that would go to a board for approval.

[ckdarby]

$2-5M and 1.5 years of time is all it takes.

The biggest problem is getting everyone aligned, designing a plan with minimal rework, and being able to hire incredible talent that is going to cost far more than most companies are willing to accept.

For most companies they'll try with their existing talent and it'll be +5 years and an absolute failure.

[fragmede]

And the very sizable opportunity cost of the engineering time spent on that project and not in anything more pressing. If your platform team has nothing better to do then I guess that's 1.5 years well spent, but if they have nothing better to do I have some questions about your company's engineering decisions.

[klingoff]

So, its not impossible to move clouds, it's just better to buy a smaller bank on the other cloud if you want the move to actually succeed.

[grepfru_it]

Everyone says this but very few know the true costs of keeping a private datacenter. Everyone looks at the aws final number and says oof that’s too high. Then ignore things like the 10 year old code base that is still being developed, causing outages and support requests that is not included in the on-prem cost.

When I did work for a var that was selling on-prem accounting software, that number was closer to a 20% difference in cost. Now add in large corporations discount for buying large amounts of compute and it suddenly becomes very palatable to use the cloud.

Small companies still benefit the most from on-prem.

[throw156754228]

Who said I want my own data centre if I don't want to use AWS/GCP/Azure?

[grepfru_it]

At that scale it is cheaper. If you have a requirement for only a few dozen, then webhostingtalk is all you need. When you need 100k servers, you will be managing the hardware yourself

[baq]

As a large org, you sign up for elasticity and mostly infinite rack space and power delivery. You basically turn capex into opex (though with reserved capacity you can get some capex back).

You can sidestep the worst parts of the compute lock-in by cloud-agnostic tools like k8s and terraform. Storage will always keep you hostage.

Anyway - the grass will be greener on the other side regardless of what you do.

[jerrygenser]

would there be a scenario where you prefer to mark it as capex? opex has the advantage of reducing tax immediately and getting the tax benefit right away. I feel like that's always an advantage

[baq]

In a large org you may have a quota for both and zero incentive to not spend.

[oldpersonintx]

most of the SP500?

I mean...they also signed up to get power from a private utility company

they also signed up to lease their own office from a commercial realtor

they also signed up to put their company intelligence into a closed-source ERP or CRM...

etc etc

indeed lets turn this around...what companies are believing it is a strategic advantage to reinvent S3?

[KronisLV]

Vouching for this, because if it's indeed a bad take, I’d like someone to explain why.

For the most part, it seems like a reasonable buy vs rent argument, except that if you try to build your own internal self-service cloud platform for the dev teams (or just have ops teams that are in charge of provisioning and running things), you also have a lot of complexity and employee time spent there, with it often being hard to get right.

I don’t thing orgs necessarily care that much about overpaying for some EC2 instances or load balancers when that lets them iterate reasonably quickly and have fewer compliance headaches and good SLAs.

[znpy]

I’m don’t 100% agree on this: this isn’t 2014 anymore, many solutions (“on prem $service”) have already been developed, are fairly known and have backing companies ready to sell you support and solutions rather than just asking you to pay rent. Example: cloudian or minio for s3-compatible storage.

[KronisLV]

There's also SeaweedFS (https://github.com/seaweedfs/seaweedfs/wiki/Amazon-S3-API) and Garage (https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/) that are promising, in addition to MinIO. There was also Zenko, but that one seems to be in a bit of an awkward place: https://github.com/scality/cloudserver/issues/5469

I'm all for using on-prem self hosted options when available, personally I run my own mail server (though a pre packaged version), Nextcloud, Gitea and many other services. However, that's mostly for my own personal needs and to explore the software out there.

In many of the orgs out there, especially the larger ones, telling people that they should provision their own hardware because I want to run a self hosted piece of software instead of pressing a few buttons in a web UI somewhere (or having a few scripts written and run) to provision things would be a tough sell. Even if they could get me a dedicated box somewhere, I'd still have to be responsible for managing said software, instead of just taking on the SaaS approach and not having my career be on the line for not doing everything correctly.

In practice, of course, that basically means SaaSS: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...

[znpy]

in any decent organization you don't run any of the services yourself except for the software you write, an infrastructure and platform teams do that for you.

going back to on-prem doesn't mean developers need to manage their own mysql database or stuff like that.

[everforward]

The power company is almost entirely different; everywhere in the US I’m aware of caps utility profits so the “getting gouged” risk is literally illegal.

Commercial real estate leases are often for a long duration, also nullifying a lot of the gouging risk.

The downside of using S3 is that their billing model tends to create complexity around trying to use it as little as possible. Many projects will need to spend significant time on “how do we minimize S3 costs?”.

I would wager most consumers of S3 are not in the “has a high enough scale of data to have genuinely complex problems” crowd and would be basically fine with MinIO or any of the various on-premise storage vendors offering an S3 API.

[tjoff]

The alternative to using S3 is to do it themselves?

Also, do you really specifically want S3? The value of S3 is working at scale but very few but amazon needs that scale. So many other solutions work just as well.

[wiether]

S3 in regard of vendor lock is a bad take since it's probably the easiest service on AWS to migrate from with dozens of fully compatible solutions existing outside.

Even EC2 (AWS's VMs) require more work to migrate from.

[everforward]

S3’s lock-in is financial rather than technical, especially if you’re using Glacier for backups that need to be moved. It gets really expensive to pay for egress on all that data.

[throw156754228]

No this argument is not analogous. I worked for a bank that upped and moved offices on a commercial lease renewal. Let me know when you hear of a bank migrating Cloud providers and I will reconsider. It is 100% vendor lock in, no escape.