Ah, most of b-guys are uncompetitive and make money by just being in already lucrative businesses. That's why there are solutions with Microsoft technologies.
Most of these are what I'd call "cloud in name only" providers - everyone uses the term but you would have significant challenge moving a cloud workload that makes use of the higher layer abstractions to these.
There are very few workloads that require more than what you can accomplish with a handful of VMs. Using tools like Terraform makes it a lot easier to abstract away the specialised services.
I work with a couple workloads that can’t even be completely deployed in cloud environments. Those aren’t common.
The vast majority of companies can get along with a Google office license and a Wix website.
Not everyone works at a company with hundreds of thousands of employees and hundreds of millions of users.
I agree RDS, Aurora, Big Query, S3, load balancers, declarative security policies, artifact repositories, managed auto-scaling clusters and so on are very convenient, but they aren’t a requirement.
You “worked with a couple of workloads” and that’s what makes you an expert on infrastructure and architecture at scale?
Your LinkedIn profile is your HN profile. I see you have worked at some large well known companies. How can you possibly not have been exposed to some large deployments?
And none of those is “the simple case” I alluded to. The vast majority of businesses need, perhaps, email, file sharing, instant messaging and, perhaps, a website. They won’t train their own ML models, nor have parallel sysplexes of mainframes spread across multiple datacenters.
So, in the grand scheme of things, how much revenue do you think all of those small businesses combined make compared to just the combined business revenue and compute needs of just the large companies you have worked for?
It surprises me that you have blinders on to an industry where you personally have worked for companies with large enough implementations that AWS has felt the need to brag about
With 20-30 people on staff if I were responsible for that architecture today. I would need:
A MySQL instance with read replicas (we had that back then onsite)
SQL Server for a some legacy projects - we had those too.
File Transfer family for FTP transfers and some automations around that.
Web servers and load balancers.
SQS and probably Lambda. Back then we used MSMQ and later MQSeries and a home grown application servers that took care of asynchronous message processing.
Web servers - a couple of EC2 instances and a load balancer and these days because of how the internet is probably WAF.
We would have needed something to orchestrate our ETL jobs. Back then we ran on 15 physical computers we would probably use something like AWS Batch today.
And of course S3.
You see how quickly your needs escalate once you are doing any real workloads?
The next smallest company I worked for had 50-60 people this was between 2018-2020. We sold access to aggregated publicly available health care provider data as well as some other health care related data. Our micro services were used by large health care companies as the backend to their websites and mobile devices and one new customer could increase the load on services they subscribed to by 20%.
Here we also needed multiple MySqL databases, CloudFront, WAF, Cognito, ElasticSearch, Redshift for large analytical loads, EC2 for some legacy software, S3, ECS for the microservices, Lambda/SQS and step functions for some ETL jobs that scaled from 0 to hundreds of thousands of transactions, Cognito for authentication, etc
You might not remember. But around March 2020, health care providers websites were being hit hard because of a little virus that was going around, the scalability that we put in place came in handy then.
Do you propose that we should have hosted all of that on some VMs?
You need to find the right balance between an expert IT team and cheaper employees. Using pre-baked cloud services is always easier, requires less management, but the operational expenditure is higher while the staffing cost might be lower. Where the company is based will also impact the professionals you'll have access to - there are places where you can have highly skilled people, and places where you'll struggle to even fully staff your IT operation.
> Do you propose that we should have hosted all of that on some VMs?
What do you think Amazon uses to run the services you pay for? Unicorns?
You really think that all people do with AWS is host a bunch of VMs and they manage all of the services (databases, storage, big data services, messaging apps) themselves?
I’ve used most of those services and know well that outside of DynamoDB, EC2/Lightsail, S3, DataLakes (s3+athena) and AWS Lambda.
Most of aws services have sub-par performance for insane prices, for components that can easily be replaced at scale with open source more mature components.
Programmers have just lost all of their sysadmin skills these days and will use everything to justify the need for these insane , low performance abstraction abomination that Netifly, AWS RDS, AWS RedisCache, AWS TimeseriesDB, etc are.
Whatsapp used to process billions of users and exited for a billion dollar+ valuation and exit, with just a few FreeBSD running VPSes running their code, and a 20 person employee team…
Most people will never touch stuff in scale of whatsapp, stack overflow, instagram.
and they did it all just fine. Programmers should be mandated to learn Linux and Sysadmin skills again instead of re-inventing entire bullshit services for what is essentially often systemd replacement or a crontab/fcron replacement.
Maybe all of these companies know something you don’t know?
For every WhatsApp that you cite used their own infrastructure, I can site companies like Netflix and Apple that decided to use the public cloud and AWS in particular
> Programmers have just lost all of their sysadmin skills these days and will use everything to justify the need for these insane , low performance abstraction abomination that Netifly, AWS RDS, AWS RedisCache, AWS TimeseriesDB, etc are.
Does it add business value as programmers to spend time babysitting infrastructure? Does it “make the beer taste better”? Does it help to move faster? I can set up an entire highly available data center with all of these services you mentioned with a few lines of yaml/HCL.
If is is a vendor work, you should probably hire person who are competitive in software engineering space. And do we actually need significant amount of processing as a solution? If this is the case, common markdowned public pdfs should be open-sourced. We shouldn't repeat other's work.
