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Comment by gorkonsine | Hacker News Reader

This should be a good warning about what you can expect when relying on other companies for service.

That's fine to depend on 3rd parties, provided you have a clear binding contract you have negotiated. The problem with SAAS is that there is no such a contract, there are just TOS which means they can to kick you out for no reason.

This is such a meaningless statement. What exactly are you trying to convey?

Don't ever use services provided by a third party. That's why I cut my own hair, make my own toothpaste, and create my own electricity from coal I mine myself!

Your comparison, and the toaster one by the responder, are nonsensical. There's a difference between a product and a service. Toothpaste is a product, not a service. AWS is a service, not a product. You can buy toothpaste anywhere; if you want to compare with AWS, AWS is like hiring a dental hygienist to come to your house twice a day and brush your teeth for you instead of doing it yourself. The hair-cutting bit is valid, but lots of people cut their own hair, especially men. The electricity bit is only partially valid; coal is a commodity that you can buy, just like toothpaste. You can also buy solar panels and make yourself totally independent of the electric utility. But it falls down because electric utilities are utilities and are regulated as such, whereas AWS is not regulated. The toaster thing is just dumb; toasters are cheap commodities. Again, the AWS comparison is hiring a butler to make your toast for you.

And if you want toasted bread, don't buy that $5 toaster, but source your own: http://www.thetoasterproject.org/page2.htm

Bush league... I perfarmd my owne brained sugery Las week.

>not generating it in a home-made hamster wheel magnetic generator

There's always a danger when you rely on outside provider for something that's critical to your business or life. Sometimes you can't avoid it or it's completely infeasible to, but choose carefully.

I see too many companies using AWS for stuff they could fairly easily self-host.

By "self-host", don't you mean "rely on a landlord / ISP / colocation facility"?

Back in days we rented servers and created our env, it was not really that hard. And it was super easy to move from one provider to another.

AWS created a Cambrian explosion of people hosting stuff that have no business doing so. Those people can't just go back to colocating hardware at datacenters... I wonder if they could even effectively get their equipment racked and wired up.

Having to get approval for a capital expense was a filter that prevented teams with zero ops experience from trying to just brute-force google their way through.

The teams I see the most often, in pre-cloud days got nothing done because touching a server meant going through experienced ops teams that could conduct architecture reviews, security reviews and maintenance planning but which didn't have any motivation or incentives to actually launch new products. Cloud means these teams can get things done, at the expense of not having any thought put to architecture, security, or maintenance.

Sure, it's not hard, but it's not possible for them.

> Back in days we rented servers

As you do with AWS...

> and created our env

As you do with AWS...

> And it was super easy to move from one provider to another.

Which is easier on cloud hosting than it ever was when dealing with colocation providers.

Well it's not quite the same with AWS if you start making use of any of their facilities past straight EC2 instances.

AWS provides a number of SAAS offerings which, if you make use of them, tie you to Amazon specifically, as opposed to an IAAS offering which is likely to be more easily portable to another provider.

No, if it's for non-web-hosting stuff, I mean buying your own servers and administering them yourself.

Obviously, web-hosting stuff is a little different. AWS is a lot more than just web hosting: it's a cloud computing provider.

At some level you're always relying on other companies for a service. Even Google does -- they don't own the last mile.

However, even if you expect people to CoLo, you're still relying on a the facility for power, cooling, networking, security. Moreover, AWS is a paid service, there should be some expectation of conflict resolution. It's not like Google where Gmail is free and there really isn't any reason you should be able to reach out to someone.

What you should be arguing is not that we shouldn't rely on a _single_ provider. Redundancy is fairly cheap in terms of material, even if a little time-capital expensive to set up.

As another responder astutely pointed out below, services like this aren't contractually-bound, they're subject to TOSes. Good luck getting any kind of conflict resolution with a giant company when all you have are TOS. Companies that rely on other companies for service, when they do it right, use contracts.

Your point about having multiple providers is very sound though; if all you have available is AWS-like services with TOSes, being able to easily switch between them mitigates your risk.

> As another responder astutely pointed out below, services like this aren't contractually-bound, they're subject to TOSes.

Yes, I did say it should be expected, not that it is :(

This is where large companies are most to blame -- they sell products and services, but have no support unless you pay extra. I can understand out-of-hours or technical support, but basic accounting and account issues (e.g. account lockouts) should really be unethical to not support for a paid service. (I don't quite want to say illegal, but it shouldn't be the norm like it is now.)

I've had significantly better dealings with "smaller" shops with this kind of thing. Basic account support always appears to be the first thing to the chopping block as they grow :(

> services like this aren't contractually-bound

By default, no. But you can get contracts in place.

I look forward to your blog post on how to run a datacenter without power, internet connections, etc.

Companies used to have their own servers all the time before "cloud computing" became a thing.

GP's point is that those places still relied on power and networking from other places.

It's a counter to the broader point of not relying on others. You simply can't. Are there better ways to rely on others (e.g. specific contracts)? yes. Are there ways of not relying on single providers? yes. Are there ways of relying on no one? No.

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