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Comment by pmiller2 | Hacker News Reader

Well, I guess every company on AWS is screwed, huh?

My coworker wrote a service that scales extremely well (he pretty much maintains, monitors and operates it by himself, across dozens of servers).

He has written multiple deployment options. Kubernetes, Docker swarm, bare VMs, etc. He has tested all of them and written installation tools that can deploy to any of them.

For exactly the reason you imply, he doesn't trust any of these options to always be available. I think this mentality has a lot to do with why his service scales so well.

And while he was doing that, how many features could he have added that would increase revenue for the company?

And while he was doing that, how many features could he have added that would increase revenue for the company?

There's more to building a long-term, sustainable business than optimizing revenue at any cost. And part of that "more" is exactly the work you to do insure against future risks.

What’s more likely to happen first - Amazon will stop offering an AWS service that you depend on at a price you are willing to pay or that the system you are building will become obsolete and when the time comes to replace it, you can choose different infrastructure? I would even say that your company going out of business is a bigger risk than depending on AWS.

The old saying that no one ever got fired for choosing IBM could be applied equally to AWS. The companies that chose IBM in the 70s and 80s can still buy new compatible systems. The companies that chose Stratus or VAX, not so much.

You're kind of operating on hindsight bias here.

Let’s take today’s equivalent - what’s the likelihood of Amazon not offering AWS or even Microsoft walking away from Azure and pulling the rug out from under developers?

Even businesses that chose Microsoft technology in the 90s when they were the clear leader have had a relatively painless upgrade and support path. They abandoned VB6 15 years ago, but you can still wrap your VB6 code as a COM object and interact with C#.

I’m saying that it is the safer bet to go with the largest provider with the largest customer base. In the 80s that would be IBM, in the 90s, MS over SUN (and the royal claustrof%%% that Java has become under Oracle) or Borland.

What is the "largest customer base" relative to? In the early 2000s, most Fortune 100s used Solaris [1]- presumably this trend started in the 90s, so I don't know why you think that a manager during that time period would choose Microsoft over Sun except for specific use cases (e.g., smaller hosting providers).

Let's look at yesterday's equivalent to AWS- Sun Grid. Sun was viewed back during the first dotcom era in much the same way that AWS is today. All that it would take to completely bork it would be an economic catastrophe that mirrors the first dotcom bubble. Obviously, Sun Grid is no more.

[1] https://news.netcraft.com/archives/2004/11/16/solaris_remain...

Solaris didn’t disappear overnight like Smyte did. When Sun was acquired by Oracle they just didn’t abandon thier customers - that would have been too value destroying.

You can still buy Solaris based systems today but you would have plenty of time to migrate. But seeing the writing on the wall you would have plenty of time to migrate.

I think you're committing something of a "fallacy of the excluded middle" here. Those aren't the only two things that can happen. AWS could, for example, continue offering the service but not to you. We've already heard stories of AWS accounts being closed for various reasons, and it's hardly a stretch to imagine a CloudFront / Daily Stormer kind of scenario where Amazon decides to punt you for taking an unpopular political position, etc.

I would even say that your company going out of business is a bigger risk than depending on AWS.

I would say that I disagree, in at least some cases.

I think there’s a balance you can strike between things. But it’s not always a single variable. Learning those things was probably valuable to him in other ways though. If he eventually grows his service and has to hire someone to manage ops he’ll be much more capable of evaluating them.

Because his service scales so well, it is bringing in a lot of revenue for the company (sorry, don't know the exact amount), at a very low cost. He is a very productive developer.

Whatever his salary is as an engineer, he is definitely underpaid.

Since I have mostly avoided doing side projects outside of work to learn something new [1], I understand spending extra time at work to scratch an itch and doing a low priority project as long as it doesn’t interfere with revenue generating - or cost reducing - initiatives.

[1] I would much rather work on a work related project using a new to me technology and if it requires longer hours to complete it, I’m find with putting in the extra time. It seems like more of a win, I get to learn a new technology, get to see it actually be used by others, and it will be helpful during either review time or worse case a resume builder.

Well, I guess every company on AWS is screwed, huh?

Screwed? Maybe, maybe not. At risk? Abso-fucking-lutely. There are plenty of stories out there of companies who had their AWS accounts shut-down for some random reason, plenty of stories of AWS outages, etc. Even if Amazon does't pull a "Smyte", there's plenty of risk associated with being on (or "solely on") AWS.

By and large, anytime you are completely dependent on someone else's platform, you are increasing risk by putting your destiny in someone else's hands.

Eventually yes. Fortunately there is enough demand for actual machines, but if that ever goes away and all of our compute power is owned by a handful of companies then we'll be well on our way to a scary dystopian future.

At the moment everyone is trying to do a land grab, but once that phase is over and the market consolidates on 2 or 3 cloud providers and sysadmin skills have disappeared we'll see what a disaster it is.

> At the moment everyone is trying to do a land grab, but once that phase is over and the market consolidates on 2 or 3 cloud providers and sysadmin skills have disappeared we'll see what a disaster it is.

And if that happens people (I'm looking at YOU, software and devops engineers, with your damned sketchy business cases, desperate to move projects onto AWS mostly so you can bolster your CVs) will only have themselves to blame.

Fortunately I suspect there are enough of us jaded and sceptical types around to avoid it.

Truly competent Ops folks are setting up Terraform/Terragrunt modules for multiple providers and designing with cloud agnosticism in mind.

If they aren't, either they're incompetent, the CTO is, or you don't really have a company yet.

What part of terraform is cloud agnostic?

Uh, the whole thing? Do you need a link to the documentation or something?

I'm as big of a Hashicorp fanboy as you will ever find for on prem implementations -- I've used Consul, Nomad, and Vault. But that's simply not true. Here is an example of a Terraform template straight from their getting started page.

https://github.com/terraform-providers/terraform-provider-aw...

There's nothing preventing you from using other providers as well. You just have to understand how to achieve the same results when you build your modules.

So you have to rewrite your modules for each platform so you're still tying yourself to one vendor and that still doesn't alleviate risks from migration or the large amount of regression testing -- just in case Amazon goes out of business or you can might be able to find an equivalent slightly cheaper?

If you are a small company, the difference isn't worth the risk and the expense. If you are a large company you can probable negotiate with Amazon.

That doesn't even take into account all of the dependencies that your developers have taken on AWS services....

So you are saying if I take my AWS infrastructure, which I launch with my terraform config, I can simply use that same config to launch the same infra on GCP or DO? Didn't think so. It's only slightly more agnostic than AWS CloudFormation, in that I can at least use some of the same conventions when I completely rewrite my terraform files.

I think you are confusing "agnostic" with "compatible with lots of different providers", but will require a total rewrite if you want to switch providers.

That's also what's attractive about Kubernetes - it's nearly a provider-independent cloud API.

And then you get yet another level of abstraction. It's about like developers who want to wrap all of their data access in a repository pattern just in case they want to change databases.

Two things about that -- hardly anyone ever changes infrastructure just to save a little money and their code has to be so generic that they can't take advantage of all of the features of the platform.

The chances are far greater that your company will go out of business way before Amazon stops offering AWS. Theory is great that Terraform allows you to seamlessly move infrastructure between cloud providers, but the amount of risk and regression testing it takes to do so would make it a non starter for most companies.

The idea I'm floating isn't not to use AWS, it's to not be locked into it. Don't use the things that only they offer.

This isn't just about cloud provider lock-in, but something you need to do to have a good DR strategy.

Back on that Christmas Day that Linode got DDOSed, my company was 100% on their infrastructure. I only had to work a couple of hours that day because I had worked and planned in advance to launch our infrastructure on another host. I saved my company from a multi-million dollar loss that day.

So if you're using AWS and instead of using their services, you're just hosting your own equivalents on EC2 instances, what's the point? The entire reason behind using AWS is the "undifferentiated heavy lifting" - allowing them to take most of the burden off of you except where your company can add value.

If all you're doing is hosting a bunch of VPS's, you're really not saving yourself too much over just using a bunch of colocated servers. You can also get much cheaper, less reliable, less geographic diverse hosting somewhere else.

But I would have my head handed to me if I even suggested to a company to base their entire infrastructure on Linode instead of AWS, Azure, or even GCP.

There isn't one way or reason to use cloud infrastructure. Maybe for smaller companies the "undifferentiated heavy lifting" narrative makes sense and I've used it as such in the past.

Managing tens of millions of dollars in physical and cloud infrastructure at multiple providers/dcs for a publicly traded company like I am now? No, that's not the reason to use cloud infrastructure at all. Cloud in this case is more about capacity planning and avoiding managing hardware inventory than anything.

You realize that this is exactly what Netflix is doing? They are using a lot of AWS services and have completely tied their fate to AWS.

That's not entirely true now but has been in the past. They've actually tied their fates to both AWS and GCE in different parts of their infrastructure. The obvious example of this is the one or two global outages they've had due to misconfiguration in GCE this year.

I know their video encoding platform is heavily tied to AWS because the teams that built it optimized for cost (which for them makes a certain amount of sense) and they massively parallelize the encoding work. I talked to some of their engineers at re:Invent last year and it was kind of interesting. They aren't using a lot of AWS-specific stuff though, just AWS EC2 reserved instances.

I don't think that just because they're Netflix that everything they're doing is correct. This can't possibly be true.

Employees wouldn't have to keep one eye on their CV and plan for the next job if employers treated employees better and gave them long term security & oppertunities.

I think you might be underestimating AWS migrations initiated at the executive level.

I dare say the AWS sales pitch is even more effective at that level: "Increase your agility, reduce your operational overhead, scale out with the push of a button. Be like Netflix and Apple."

Most executives aren't well-equipped to probe the sharp corners that aren't in the pitch.

Not even eventually. Right now. How many companies out there absolutely depend on all the value add services that AWS provides that are hard to replicate?

Does your business depend on Amazon Transcribe (or any other AWS-only service)? Do you have engineers competent to turn around an equivalent product for you in a short release window? No? (Don't lie to yourself. It's no.) Congratulations, you are now Amazon's bitch.

Internally we have physical servers, externally we us linode deployed via ansible, we don't rely on any linode specific features (api'snor anything).

I (as the sole programmer) made that decision early on.

AWS is a none starter because of the gradual vendor lockin (also nature of our business means growth/scalability is very easily predicted).

I think people will start feeling the pain when Amazon isn’t printing money anymore and starts looking at winding down less popular/profitable services.

I think we're already there, and it isn't much of a dystopia. There are only 3 big cloud providers, and many major companies rely on them for everything.

But their business is built on providing this service. At what point would Amazon, Google or Microsoft say "we don't want that $xB in revenue, just turn it off. NOW!

Is that what you're suggesting is the future?

At that point government would step in and nationalise that part of the company :-)

More seriously I can see cloud going the way of telecoms in that there would be a provider of last resort if a telco goes bust another operator takes over to provide service.

The more likely risk is not them turning it off, but increasing prices.

Of course, it's a competitive market, so the other two providers would eat their lunch.

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