Hacker News Reader

Comment by jbmsf | Hacker News Reader

I can't agree, at least not in general.

The optionality of being cloud agnostic comes with a huge cost, both because of all the pieces you have to build+operate and because of the functionality you have to exclude from your systems.

I am sure there are scales where you either have such a large engineering budget that you can ignore these costs or where decreasing your cloud spend is the only way to scale your business. But for the average company, I can't see how spending so much on infrastructure (and future optionality) pays off, especially when you could spend on product or marketing or anything else that has a more direct impact on your success.

View on HN

> But for the average company, I can't see how spending so much on infrastructure (and future optionality) pays off, especially when you could spend on product or marketing or anything else that has a more direct impact on your success.

If you change "average company" to "average startup" then your point make sense. But for a normal company not everything needs to make a direct impact on your success. For example guaranteeing long term business continuity is an important factor too.

Unless you’re planning for the possibility of AWS dropping offline permanently with little to no notice, it really feels like you’re just paying a huge insurance premium. Like any insurance, it’s down to whether you need insurance or could cover the loss. Whether you’d rather incur a smaller ongoing cost to avoid the possibility of a large one time loss.

If AWS suddenly raised their prices 10x overnight, it would hurt but not be an existential threat for most companies. At that point they could invest six months or a year into migrating off of AWS.

Rough numbers that would end up costing us like $4m in cloud spend and staff if we retasked the entire org to accomplishing that for a year.

There’s certainly an opportunity cost as well, but I’d argue it’s not dissimilar to the opportunity cost we’d have been paying all along to maintain compatibility with multiple clouds.

Obviously it’s just conjecture, but my gut says the increased velocity of working on a single cloud and using existing Amazon services and tools where appropriate has made us significantly more than the costs of something that may never happen.

Strong agree.

Plus I've seen more than a few efforts at multi-cloud that resulted in a strong dependency on all clouds vs the ability to switch between them. So not only do you not get to use cloud-specific services, you don't really get any benefit in terms of decoupling.

I take your point, but I still don't quite agree.

There are obviously plenty of companies that are willing to couple themselves to a single cloud vendor (e.g. Netflix with AWS) and plenty of business continuity risks that companies don't find cost effective to pursue. Has anyone been as vocal about decoupling from CRM or ERB systems as they are with cloud?

My own view is that these kinds of infrastructure projects create as many risks as the solve and happen at least as much because engineers like to solve these kinds of problems than for any other reason.

> The optionality of being cloud agnostic comes with a huge cost, both because of all the pieces you have to build+operate

This sounds like cloud vendor kool aid to me. Nearly every cloud vendor product above the infrastructure layer is a version of something that exists already in the world. When you outsource management of that to your cloud vendor you might lose 50% of the need to operationally manage that product but about 50% of it is irreducible. You still need internal competence in understanding that infrastructure and one way or another you're going to develop it over time. But if its your cloud vendor's proprietary stack then you are investing all your internal learning into non-transferrable skills instead of ones that can be generalised.

I think it's economy of scale, not kool-aid.

I can run PostgreSQL myself but there's a ton that goes into running it with redundancy, backup, encryption, etc that takes deep expertise to well. I know from experience that it's easy to get database failover wrong. I could probably cobble something together, but it would be mediocre and wouldn't handle network partitions reliably. On the other hand, RDS is used at a scale well beyond what I could afford to build out and has benefitted from much more usage. Problems that are low probability for me are regular events for RDS and have that experience built in.

Ultimately, you are paying a cloud vendor for service value and operational experience. Some services aren't as good as others in both regards, but for the ones that are good, the overhead of doing it yourself is an exponent, not a fraction.

To be honest, I would probably fit RDS more into the infrastructure layer than the application layer. I think there is value in having things at that level be managed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com