I already have AMIs, autoscaling groups, health checks, ELBs, etc. Why am I adding another unnecessary layer of abstraction?
Disclaimer: Devops/sysadmin who would like to get off the hype train and get real work done.
People don't realize how deep Amazon's hooks are at scale. We were dropping half a million USD a month at that successful startup I mentioned and could do the same work with four or five racks of hardware, storage included. I bet you could cut your opex in half on something else, and it's a safe bet because (a) I've seen it be resoundingly true even coming from three year reservations and (b) half is actually a conservative estimate. I am floored by how much money the industry throws at the fundamental inefficiency of multitenant virtualization atop AWS.
What a strange argument, considering Amazon a primitive. That's flirting with vendor koolaid. Physical and DigitalOcean/cheapo deployments are an immediate counterexample, too. Hell, if network latency is low enough, you can straddle both and schedule Kubernetes pods on whichever provider is cheaper on a given day. Spot instances, too. Lots of possibilities.
Note I said "AWS primitives", not AWS as a primitive. I think they're overly expensive unless you're using them for prototyping, as you should eventually move off to your own gear once you know what your load/compute/storage profiles look like.
I appreciate you pointing out that this is most valuable when you're _not_ running in AWS (I work at a startup that wants to use this tech in AWS, hence my not understanding why we'd waste additional abstraction for little additional benefit).
Disclaimer: I _want_ to move off of AWS to our own physical gear at some point, but our dev team is married to it because they're afraid of physical infrastructure (but its okay when critical services like EC2, autoscaling, and IAM aren't working for several hours apparently).
> but what about when you want to move to GCE to arbitrage price differences for certain services?
Already doing so without additional (unnecessary?) tooling, like Docker or Kubernetes (build images at respective cloud providers, use existing orchestration tools to spin up or terminate spot (AWS)/preemptible (GCE) instances).