Hacker News Reader

Comment by oatmeal_croc | Hacker News Reader

"further 29% noting they’ve switched public cloud providers in the first half of 2022 due to high prices"

Wait, what? There's no way 29% of companies noped their way out of cloud provider lock-in. Not saying it doesn't happen, but 29% is a huge number.

Unless of course they're startups with no idea how they want their infrastructure run or legacy companies dipping their feet (?) in the cloud for the first time.

View on HN

More and more companies (newer ones of course, those unburned by legacy) use public clouds as "managed Kubernetes and maybe a few other things like a database, load balancer, object storage". That way there is close to no lock-in, so the biggest challenge in switching clouds would be how to migrate the data and do the failover with minimal downtime.

It may be easier, but still take a lot of work to migrate. Perhaps k8s + object store + LB is easier for the developer, who has a few AWS APIs to replace, but is otherwise not affected. But talk to the person who has to rewrite 5k+ lines of terraform, figure out users, roles & policies in a new IAM, aunderstands the differences between EKS and GKE (what's the Google equivalent for IRSA?). None of it is rocket science, but it's time consuming. And while Google can migrate data from external databases (including AWS Aurora) it's still a big squeaky-bum moment.

Not really the point of your comment, but...

The GKE equivalent of EKS IRSA is GKE Workload Identity.

It's pretty much the same user experience:

* Enable Workload Identity on your cluster

* Create a GCP service account

* Grant your Kubernetes service account permission to act as the GCP service account.

It's a bit more seamless because you don't need to upgrade your client libraries. Instead there is an on-node metadata server that provides access tokens to workloads.

Disclosure: I work on this

Thanks. I may have to work on this pretty soon!

I'd guess that does not mean that 29% moved all of their services to the competition. They might just buy a tiny bit from the competition compared to earlier just buying everything from their (expensive) main provider for convenience.

Our only lock-in was using the GCS api instead of S3. I spent a week porting it to S3 and now there's nothing binding us to GCP. There's a whole bunch of S3 compatible storage solutions, we went with Backblaze's B2 as a secondary, if it proves stable and performant we'll switch over and find another cheap provider for our backup.

We're a rather simple company though, less than a dozen services, we use Postgres and Redis for storage, everything deployed on Kubernetes.

A lot of companies run vanila VMs 24/7. Switching providers is quite easy - just add some networking and a migration tool. The key here is just the DNS or the AD.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com