>well that would be a lot of choice for the developers!
A sad choice though. The centralization of computation is likely not a good thing in the long run.
A sad choice though. The centralization of computation is likely not a good thing in the long run.
The advantages of owning your own hardware will never go away, but soon this will be made quite intentionally impossible as the big players coalesce and continue building their walled gardens.
This is already happening. All the big players own their hardware and rent it out to everyone else, while trying to convince everyone it's not worth owning your own hardware at the same time.
These companies have already begun closing off server platforms by developing custom hardware and software systems that cannot be bought for any price, only rented. These systems represent a new breed of technology with unbreakable vendor lock in.
Theses same companies compete with each other and countless other companies across the space. Take for example a start-up that wants to run their own app store. Google, Amazon, and Microsoft all run app stores. Where will this company go for cloud services? Their only big name options are to host their software on the hardware of a direct competitor. Their host has full visibility on how their system works, and control over the pricing and reliability of their machines.
It's laughable to think their "cloud partner" will give them any chance to compete if they enter the same market.
We've seen UEFI BIOS and un-unlockable mobiles enter the market in droves the last few years. A lot of new PC's can't run anything except windows. A lot of new phones can only run the carrier's version of android. We have all these general purpose CPUs that can no longer run general purpose programs because "security", and a lot of lobbyist pushing to make it actually illegal to run your own software on these with "anti tampering" laws, again for "security" . Soon the big guys (same companies, MS and Google) will make it impossible to run your own software on any reasonably inexpensive devices and the walled market will be complete.
Mark my words, I've never seen an industry with a couple big players where growth and innovation doesn't eventually turn into collusion, higher prices, and market stagnation. Once MS, Google and Amazon have their slice of the pie and they've killed off everyone else, we will see the death of general purpose computers and mobile devices. Everything you buy will be "android computer" "windows computer" and "apple computer". Anything general purpose will be massively more expensive because individual companies can't get the kind of volume discount of the giant behemoths that increasingly control large swaths of the world's computing power. We've already seen the endgame, with Amazon trialing an "on premesis" version of their compute platform which is basically a super locked down server that you can't buy, only rent endlessly. The future of on premesis will be a cloud in a black box if these companies have anything to do with it. Why? Because once they've got you locked in it makes no sense to sell you anything for keeps. Why keep improving their product so you buy the new version when they can just make it incompatible with everything else and force you to rent it forever, for whatever price they feel like charging?
One day running your own servers will be like running your own ISP . Massively impractical because the free market has been manipulated to the point that it effectively no longer exists
What? People use cloud computing because it already is massively impractical to run your own servers. Hardware is hard to run and scale on your own and experiences economies of scale. This principle is seen everywhere and can hardly be viewed as something controversial. Walmart for instance can sell things at a really low price because of the sheer volume of their sales. Similarly, data centers also experience economies of scale.
As someone who cares about offering the best possible, reliable user experience, cloud computing is absolutely the next logical step from bare metal on-prem servers. When your system experiences load outside the constraints of what it can handle, a properly designed app that has independently scaling microservices horizontally scales.
Even if you had the state of the art microservice architecture running on a kubernetes cluster on your own hardware, you still wouldn't be able to source disk/CPU fast enough if your service happens to experience loads beyond what you provisioned.
And there is the rub, buying your own hardware costs money, and no one wants to buy hardware they may not ever use. Another advantage of cloud computing.
You are seeing the peak of free market right now, because of cloud computing, which enables people with little upfront cash to invest to form real internet businesses and scale massively.
You think a game like Pokemon Go can exists and do the release they did without cloud computing?
Secondly, software companies like Microsoft, Google and IBM might know a thing or two about running data centers. Due to economies of scale, these companies are inherently in a better position to supply hardware at scale.
> If entire region is down do you think other regions can handle the load. If you think so you're kidding yourself
Netflix routinely does just this to test the resilience of their systems. They pick a random AWS region, and they evacuate it. All the traffic is proxied to the other regions and eventually via DNS the traffic is routed entirely to the surviving regions. No interruption of service is experienced by the users.
Here's a visualization of Netflix simulating a failure on the US-east-1 region and failing over to US-west-1/US-west-2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVbTjlZ0sfE
The top right node is the one that fails. As the error rate climbs, traffic starts getting proxied over to the surviving nodes, until a DNS switch redirects all traffic to the surviving nodes. Netflix does this monthly, in production. They also run https://github.com/Netflix/SimianArmy on production.
The cloud enables fault tolerance, resiliency and graceful degradation.
No, tooling to failover and spin up new instances does that. An enterprise with 3 data centers can do that.
"the cloud" is just doing it on someone else's hardware.
One person, with maybe 3 hours a week of time investment after a few weeks of setup and hardware purchase. Using containers I can move between the cloud and my own servers seamlessly, and long as I never bite the golden apple and use any of the cloud's walled garden "services" like S3. If I need more power I can spin up some temporary servers at any cloud provider in a few hours. For me the cloud is a nice thing because I don't use too much of it. If AWS disappeared tomorrow it would be a mild inconvenience, not devestating like it would be to many newer unicorns.
Go ahead and try to use the cloud you're paying for as a CDN or DDoS sheild, or anything amounting to a bastion of free speech. You'll quickly find out that your cloud provider doesn't like you to use all the bandwidth and CPU you pay for, and they don't like running your servers when they disagree with your views. They quietly overprovision everything pulling the same crap as consumer ISPs where they sell you a 100mbps line and punish you if you use more than 10 of that on average. That's the main reason the cloud is so cheap.
Hardware is cheap, colo's are cheap, software is largely easy to manage. The economy of scale they enjoy is from vendor lock-in and overprovisioning more than anything else.
Is it really that hard to double the amount of servers you own every few weeks? No! If you're using containers or managed KVM you can mirror nodes basically for free over the network as soon as the Ethernet is plugged in. Your time amounts to what it takes to put the thing in a rack, plug in the Ethernet, and hit the "on" button. Everybody in SV land thinks you have to use cloud to "scale massively" but they forget that all of today's technology behemoths were built years ago when the cloud didn't exist. Oh yeah, they all still run all of their own hardware too and have from the early days. Using their model as a template, you should own every single server you use and start selling your excess capacity once you get big enough.
Did you ever read about how Netflix tried to run their own hardware but can't because they have so much data in AWS that it would basically bankrupt them to extract it? Look at how these cost models work. Usually inbound bandwidth is extremely cheap or free but outbound is massively more expensive than a dedicated line at a datacenter, 50-100 times the cost if you're saturating that line 24/7. The removal fees from a managed store like S3 or glacier are even more ludicrous. The cloud is like crack and as soon as you start using it more than a few times a year you will get locked in and unable to leave without spending massive $$$. Usually companies figure out this shell game once they're large enough, but by then it's far too late to do anything about it.
Why are they marketing these things so heavily to startups? Because lock in is how they make their money. They make little or nothing on pure compute power, but since you don't have low level hardware access they can charge whatever the hell they want for things like extra IP's, DDoS protection, DC to DC peering, load balancing, auto scaling. You give massive discounts to new players using these systems and inevitably some of these will become the next Uber or Netflix. Then you are free to charge whatever exhoribitant rates you please once it's so impractical to move that it would require a major redesign of the business.
I see it a lot like franchising. By building on Amazon's cloud services you become "Uber company brought to you by Amazon". Like franchising, your upside is limited because any owner with a significant share of total franchises will begin to put pressure on the service owner itself.
But any "lock in" is totally up to you. Take a look at this: https://kubernetes.io/
You can architect your system in a way that it'll run on any cloud provider. All the major Cloud Providers support kube for orchestration.
To be honest I don't think you know what you're talking about. You should refrain from making uninformed opinions on hacker news, especially on a throwaway.
Where did you read this? You can have Amazon send you a truck full of hard drives. I doubt it costs more than Netflix can afford.
Also, the truck is for data in, not data out. Getting data out of AWS is far more expensive than putting it in. That's the lock in.
Also, the truck is for data in, not data out. Getting data out of AWS is far more expensive than putting it in. That's the lock in.
This is also not true. The bulk transfer service is bi-directional.
They cache popular content close to the users, they don't manage their catalog at the edges.
The most unique thing about spanner is the use of globally synchronized clock timestamps to guarantee "comes before" consistency without the need to actually synchronize everything.
There is nothing stopping startups and open source developers from building the same thing in a few years. The missing ingredient is highly stable GPS and local time sources which will hopefully be available on cloud instances sometime soon. This is a new piece of hardware so it will be interesting to see if cloud providers make one available or use the opportunity to sell their own branded "service" version you can't buy. Unfortunately I think we'll see the latter far before the former, it it ever even exists. Without a highly stable timesource doing what spanner does will be completely impossible.
Yes spanner is special right now but that's even more reason to not go near it. Google has a complete monopoly on it, the strongest vendor lock in you can possibly have
Only "new" in the sense that it is currently not commonly offered, the devices themselves have been available for ages. (If you are a large enough customer you apparently can get at least some colo-facilities to provide you with the roof-access and cabling needed for the antennas). If cloud providers make precise time available I don't see much potential for locking you in with their specific way of providing it, as long as it ends up as precise system time in some way.
I know GPS time sources have been available forever but a fault tolent database needs a backup. The US GPS is incredibly reliable but there have been multiple issues with both Glonass and Galilio.
It sounds like Google has an additional time source making this possible, probably a highly miniaturized atomic clock, possibly on a single chip. There's no way they're running on GPS alone
So, the computational "Gini index" is increasing, but no one is being thrown into computational poverty.
Yes, and this will be disadvantageous over the long run for people that want to run things themselves. Ultimately companies like AMD/Intel go where the big money is at. As things centralize further and further, there will only be 3 customers they care about in the server market.
Maybe not, but consumers increasingly use centralized computation resources. I would guess that by now most applications used by consumers run in their web browser, such as Facebook.
Now, you could play with that analogy further and see some issues as well, but I don't think the issue here is centralized failure; all these data centers/"clouds" are at least good. The Cloud is about businesses focusing on core business and not supporting functions.
[Disclosure, I work on the Google Cloud team, I'm biased]
Having a devops team with the necessary expertise in Google Cloud or AWS is still a supporting function. You've just traded one skill (managing physical servers) for another (managing proprietary virtual resources).
Hence we get caching. There's the farms, then the inbound warehouses, then the distribution centers, then the grocer, then our refrigerators by the dozen or dozen and a half. When your local cache is empty of eggs, though, it requires a trip back out to the grocer to get an egg even if you need nothing else that trip. Then you generally have to buy at least half a dozen if not a dozen or more eggs just to get the one you wanted.
If I have my own couple of hens, I can go out into the yard and get an egg. If that's the whole of my fetch list, it's much more efficient for this single egg to have the hens laying right out back.
This whole few baskets metaphor breaks down from another point of view, though, when we consider that by the very nature of using a globally distributed hosted service we're actually eliminating a single basket problem. Yes, there's not much choice among just Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. (That they are the only options is a bit of a strawman, but lets grant this one legs.) However, putting just your own employees in charge of all your infrastructure in just your own datacenter(s) in just PostgreSQL or just MySQL is another single-basket problem. Spreading it out so that someone else gets to manage the hardware and the service and replicating your data widely within that service is from that point of view more baskets. You get more datacenter baskets, more employee baskets, and more software baskets. Using standard SQL means you can move among compliant software later, too, so you're not as tied to those baskets.
Now, back to your coop analogy. What's stopping me from having my application talk to Cloud Spanner and a local database proxy (or a work queue that sits between the app and the DB or whichever) so I can use Google's reliability for transactions and my local cached replicant for query speed when I'm querying older data? Why can't I keep a few eggs around?
Also, why would I be scared of Google or Amazon "having my data"? Why would I put sensitive data into my own database in plaintext and then replicate it among multiple datacenters that way?
Only if the owner of the chicken-coop has everyone else's best interests in mind. Protip: They don't.
The Cloud isn't about efficiency, it's about data control. Getting people's systems and data into Google/AWS/etc helps with data mining, vendor lock-in, etc. Often times that can be efficient, but also it often isn't.
They could tinker with the binaries, something many did with game binaries. But your point is well taken; open source is also very valuable to innovation.
The apps on top, Facebook, Snapchat, etc., are not so open and much of what they do is out of reach from the user.
Also, I meant to add above: People could tinker with data files (e.g., Word docs), configurations, etc. The whole system was local and accessible. You could write local code, such as VB or for Windows, that integrated with those systems.
Putting your savings under the mattress instead of in a bank account wouldn't have prevented the Great Depression either.
The only thing it would have accomplished is making your savings easier to steal.
I agree. It only makes sense if you need special data for statistics, AI training, etc.
In all other cases the classic way of programming on pc and notebook is smarter. If you do everything in the cloud, what if you lose Internet connection? I had that experience several times over the last years.
* Most Internet usage is via smartphone
* Computers are much more stable than they used to be
* Much of the world lives in places with less stable connections
* The most expensive spec in an Internet connection is availability. You can get a low-end 15 Mbps connection with no availability guarantee for $40/month; a T1 is one-tenth the speed and costs 10 times as much (all numbers are rough estimates).
It's only so many heavy industries that definitely need some sort of local infrastructure (probably not master tho) to be locally.