You mean if multiple availability zones go down? In AWS’s entire existence, have they been known to raise prices?
How much time, energy, and development effort are you willing to spend on “avoiding vendor lock in” in the off chance that you will move your entire infrastructure as opposed to spending those same resources creating either revenue generating features or cost saving features?
If you’re using a cloud provider as a glorified overpriced colo, you have the worse of all worlds. You’re spending more on resources and just as much babysitting infrastructure.
It’s just like the bushy tailed “architects” who create layers of “factories” and “repositories” just in case their CTO wakes up one day and decides to move their companies six figure Oracle installation to Postgres. All the while creating suboptimal queries to avoid using Oracle specific functionality.
So far most major AWS instances I’ve paid attention to have been ultimately caused by their own Rube Goldberg inspired infra. Nothing at AWS just is something,
it practically all relies on something else at AWS, and when there are outages at the apparently lowest level, the issues are wide spread.
With such convoluted systems, fat finger syndrome seems to be a not insignificant factor in their downtime, and the interdependence just makes it blow up.
But sure. If you want to trust everything to aws you go right ahead and do that.
As for rising prices - I have no idea - no company has done anything until they do it the first time. AWS doesn’t really need to increase prices to be a more expensive solution for the vast majority of companies using it.
If you don’t rely on proprietary aws “solutions” in the first place, there’s no extra “time and cost” involved. It’s just running your setup process - whatever that may be - with another location, another vendor, whatever.
Like I said if you want real HA you’re going to be running in multiple vendors all the time - it’s not something you’re going to say “well shit aws is down again let’s go sign up for azure”.
You’re going to sit back and eat crumpets because your site is running fine in spite of aws or azure or whoever’s latest brown pants event.
And to be clear I’m not suggesting using aws is a smart move over bare metal or even just regular rented virtual machines at a normal facility - the concept of HA across vendors applies the same.
Yes because colos never have a problem with reliability and most companies have better managed infrastructure than AWS/Azure/GCP.
How many companies need higher reliability than you get from any of the cloud vendors if you architect your site to across multiple AZ’s or multiple regions?
And “running your setup” means duplicating functionality on VMs where you could use managed offerings - the absolutely most expensive and least reliable way of using cloud providers and it costs more in time and resources to manage.
And you are ignoring how much money you can save by not needing as many infrastructure people.
Heck, half the time you can get away with having a much cheaper shared services/managed service provider.
Are all of the companies big and small who are using cloud vendors proprietary solutions delusional?
I see you're a graduate of the school of strawman tactics.
Of course traditional colo and rental VM hosting have outages. That's literally why I said, multiple times, if you want actual HA, you need to be using multiple vendors, regardless of what that vendor provides you - whether it's bare racks or a web GUI to "push a button to make it go now". I didn't explicitly state it, but I kind of assumed you'd realise that means different vendors in different physical DCs/locations.
Complaining to me that using basic VMs in a "cloud" service is more expensive, is like complaining to a duck that water is wet. No shit, EC2 is more expensive than even a regular rented VPS/VM service from a more 'traditional' hosting service, and much more expensive than either renting or owning physical gear in a rack.
I didn't suggest you use EC2 or AWS at all - but just because you use self-managed services doesn't mean you can't take advantage of the one thing a "cloud" service offers which traditional VM hosting doesn't: essentially instant spin up and time usage billing.
If you want to split your workload across two or three cloud providers, and run resources split such that you have just slightly more than 100% of the resources you need for regular operations, and then when (not if) one of those providers has an outage, you increase the capacity at the other provider(s) to handle the increased load it'll handle.
I'm not even going to dignify the "we don't need infra people" comment because it's not even a bad joke any more, it's more like a warning of management who have no fucking idea what is involved.
I don't know what motivations each company has when deciding what technologies they should use. But if you're suggesting that companies don't ever make bad choices because of (a) uninformed/misinformed management decisions, or (b) short sightedness, I'll kindly suggest you're either being very sarcastic, or you're very naive.
I'm not even going to dignify the "we don't need infra people" comment because it's not even a bad joke any more, it's more like a warning of management who have no fucking idea what is involved.
I didn’t say that you didn’t need any I said that you didn’t need “as many”. But yes, at smaller companies you can get away with no dedicated infrastructure people and just use a managed service provider. At a slightly larger company you can get away with a few people on site that manage your MSP.
So you want HA by running in multiple DCs - Exactly what happens when you run in multiple AZs and/or regions.
But if you're suggesting that companies don't ever make bad choices because of (a) uninformed/misinformed management decisions, or (b) short sightedness, I'll kindly suggest you're either being very sarcastic, or you're very naive.
So you think, Netflix for instance, who started off running all of their own servers and now are AWS biggest customers were being “naive”? Instead of thinking that all of these companies are being irrational - including major enterprises - by using cloud providers and their proprietary servers, maybe they know something that you don’t know?
Smaller companies don't necessarily need dedicated infra people regardless. My point is that using "a cloud" doesn't change your level of infrastructure experience/knowledge needs, it just changes what they need to know.
.... You're either not reading what I wrote or being deliberately obtuse. I said multiple vendors, in different DCs. The same vendor in two DCs is not as good as two different vendors in two different DCs.
I didn't say the companies are naive. I said you are being naive, if you think companies haven't made bad decisions.
My point is that using "a cloud" doesn't change your level of infrastructure experience/knowledge needs, it just changes what they need to know.
It very much does change what they need to know. You don’t need to know how to set up a database with multi region failover, load balancers, server maintenance, switches, routers, storage, firewalls, etc. Have you ever used managed services at any scale?
Yes I’ve done both - hosted our own servers in house.
A good chunk of my work is getting clients out of shit situations with "The cloud" because someone drank too much of the "Cloud means no more ops" Kool aid.
For most small to medium companies, the alternative to a managed AWS service is not "lets go buy some switches".
It's "let's use open source software on rented virtual machines". The "cloud" model is only useful if your staff have no idea how a database server works. If they do, it's going to make a heap of basic tasks harder (and more expensive) because you don't have access to the software itself.
I'm done discussing this with you. You can make all the same arguments everyone else does when trying to justify "the cloud", and you won't convince me, because your arguments are, as usual for this type of "discussion" comparing against the most extreme alternatives.
Right from the start you've declared literally no cost of being at the complete mercy of a single vendor for your entire infrastructure (and one with a history for dirty tactics to "win" a market)
If that approach works for you, good for you. I, and my clients once it's bitten them, aren't willing to do that.
And your method of getting them out of “shit situations” is not by showing them how to do it correctly - it’s by moving them to something you know.
So now, the same people who don’t have the expertise to manage a colo, are now going all of the sudden have the expertise to manage VMs and open source alternatives and know how to manage a fault tolerant multi region database and other HA setups at multiple colos?
Again, how much experience do you personally have with actually using cloud services from the big three? I’ve done both, I had to. The cloud vendors didn’t exist when I started. Heck we had a “server room” with raised floors for our “massive” 2TB SAN.
How long have you been an employed programmer? On the scale of decades things can change dramatically.
In theory (based on the cost of an instance vs the cost to get your own) AWS is grossly overpriced, and SOMEONE will eventually beat them by a very large margin for commodity services.
AWS knows this, and probably is behind all its custom features.
Well, if the 74 in my username doesn’t give it away, quite awhile. But just to give you a hint, my first professional contract in college was writing a Gopher site. My first hobby projects involved writing 65C02 assembly in the mid 80s.
As far as IBM, if someone had chosen to get “locked-in” to IBM in the 70s, they could still buy new hardware that could run their old software unmodified. Isn’t that an argument for using AWS?
In the scale of decades, most of the time you will be performing heavy rewrites anyway, are you really trying to optimize now just in case in 20 years you might want to move to something else?
Are you using the same language and frameworks you were using 20 years ago? When I first started developing I was writing C programs on DEC VAX, Stratus VOS mainframes.
If you are just using AWS to host a bunch of EC2 instances and as an overpriced colo, sure you could find much cheaper options now.
No matter what you do, more than likely you will have to migrate. Just changing infrastructure if all you’re doing is moving to VMs on another provider, reconfiguring your network if you are using a hybrid, etc is going to be a heavy lift no matter how much you try to avoid lock in and you’re spending money now for an amorphous future where you may want to change vendors instead of using your vendor of choices features that can save you money and/or time.
I would make the same argument if we were talking about Azure or God forbid Oracle.
How much time, energy, and development effort are you willing to spend on “avoiding vendor lock in” in the off chance that you will move your entire infrastructure as opposed to spending those same resources creating either revenue generating features or cost saving features?
If you’re using a cloud provider as a glorified overpriced colo, you have the worse of all worlds. You’re spending more on resources and just as much babysitting infrastructure.
It’s just like the bushy tailed “architects” who create layers of “factories” and “repositories” just in case their CTO wakes up one day and decides to move their companies six figure Oracle installation to Postgres. All the while creating suboptimal queries to avoid using Oracle specific functionality.