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Comment by williamle8300 | Hacker News Reader

Amazon wants to control markets by leading in with "convenience" factor but they will sheist you.

Buy stuff from Amazon... but for Pete's sake don't make them a core project dependency for your software projects. You only have yourself to blame when they start ratcheting up their prices.

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AWS is the system architecture of the web, full-stop. Well, a system architecture, alongside Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

Avoid them at your own peril and detriment to your ability to execute as a business.

With the exception of a few masochists, we don't write software in machine code anymore. Same will be said for cloud infrastructure (actually, it's already there). Breathe and accept the future, focus on building what's next and / or adding value to your business.

That's just silly. The internet was supposed to have no single point of failure. Now the Big Five have centralized everything. Why do you need to build centralized services on giant AWS server farms?

Unfortunately life and economics have no concern about the initial intent of anything, only the current utility.

Systems, at scale, especially when run by biological processes (read: all man-made systems), have a tendency to centralize. Economies of scale dictate that this is just more efficient. We don't have to do anything. The "evolutionary reward" (i.e. your business thrives and moves quickly) of building on AWS far exceeds SPOF issues for small, medium, and most large players. Yes, we get fun references when S3 goes down [1], but it's not as bad as literal water pipes taking down your webservers like what happened with Stats Canada [2].

The fact that Azure and Google Cloud exist maintains a competitive market. I liken it to Darwin vs Linux vs Windows. Optionality, but fundamental components of the cloud.

[1] http://funender.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/amazon-aws-is...

[2] https://twitter.com/StatCan_eng/status/873285710094233603

>The "evolutionary reward" (i.e. your business thrives and moves quickly) of building on AWS far exceeds SPOF issues for small, medium, and most large players.

Very well put. Couldn't agree more.

Can't the same argument be made for statism, against anarchists and libertarians?

The cloud will look different in the future. Adopting the locked in model puts all of your eggs in one basket. What you gain in ease you lose in flexibility and cost while increasing your risk

Right now I spend $240-600/mo for 192TB of bandwidth. I just used AWS's calculator and they charge $38,876.48/mo for the same thing.

I don't subscribe to the theory that this is "the future".

Indeed. It's a big cost escalator. We have split architecture across two DCs we own and AWS. AWS is a bad deal when you get to our size. If we moved our DCs entirely into AWS we would literally triple costs overnight. On top of that, once it's in AWS, a lot of the services that they provide aren't portable. You're stuck and it's expensive to unstick these. The tooling isn't very mature either. You'd be surprised how difficult it is moving 22TiB of file storage to S3.

The future is bare metal IaaS with something non-provider specific that sits on that as that is 100% portable between Cloud/in house. Docker/openstack that sort of thing.

>You'd be surprised how difficult it is moving 22TiB of file storage to S3.

Really? I deal with this daily. Can you email randhunt@amazon.com - if you're genuinely having or had issues moving 22TiB to S3 please LMK as that's abnormal for our customers and I want to fix it for you and others.

Thanks have passed your details on to our expert in this space.

For the public record this was mainly down to the problem of client reliability and migrating data live when there are 8,000 people hammering it with reads and writes. We went for a read/write through system and background synchronisation. The latter we had real reliability problems with and the upload performance wasn't great.

Also ROI didn't stack up in the end versus our SAN so we canned it.

Ok, if you guys pursue something like this again definitely check out something like storage gateway. It can help reduce the load in a live migration scenario like this.

The people that run their own infrastructure long ago realized that holding the key to mass consumption is the key to the control of the web. That's the thing they're all actually competing on. Good luck competing with them on it when they're controlling your rates. Cheap in, expensive out.

Imagine what would happen to AWS if more companies practiced the Amazon Leadership Principles [0]

Frugality

Accomplish more with less. Constraints breed resourcefulness, self-sufficiency and invention. There are no extra points for growing headcount, budget size or fixed expense.

Because you know Leadership Principles aren’t just a pretty inspirational wall hanging.

[0]https://www.amazon.jobs/principles

Look at the cost a different way: your data is clearly important and you just saved having to hire an ops person to help manage it part-time.

I get that this isn't reality though. Once you provision something the amount of maintenance is minimum if done well.

If you're a startup and use AWS, and face a competitor that isn't, chance is you're going to be blowing money on infrastructure 2-3 times faster than your competitor. For some companies that won't matter - if e.g. your hosting cost is dwarfed by your development cost - and then it may be worthwhile to pick them.

For others, e.g. if bandwidth is a large part of your cost, picking them will mean your competitors who go with other providers will be able to sell well below your cost and still have a healthy margin.

Avoiding them (and Google Cloud and Azure) is often essential if you want to survive.

I've used AWS since pretty much the first year they offered EC2 instances, and in that time, I believe their costs have only gone DOWN over the years.

Not just EC2 - we use S3, Glacier, Elastic Beanstalk, IoT, DynamoDB, RDS, Lambda, VPC, CloudFront, CloudWatch, Polly, Rekognition ... and I don't think I have ever seen a price increase /hr or /Gb in all that time.

That may be true, but the only reason they're not increasing their prices is that their prices are insanely high to begin with. E.g. their bandwidth prices are about 40 times as high as what I'd pay if I ever reach the included cap for my servers.

Disclaimer: I work for AWS

Computing / storage tends to get cheaper - even adjusted for inflation.

AWS has decreased prices 62 times. I'm not aware of a time where their prices increased - (maybe mechanical turk)?

Are you?

In fact I'm not aware of any cloud vendor ratcheting up their prices (I don't consider Oracle a cloud vendor). I've seen misbillings / changing terms on google cloud that resulted, unfortunately, in a few specific types of workloads having increased costs... even then I'm pretty sure they addressed that responsibly... but I'm not aware of any vendor ever increasing costs... only decreasing them... over the past 10 years.

Is Amazon really a core project dependency for software projects that use them? If prices get jacked up, I don't see why a get obect from S3 couldn't be replaced the equivalent call to Azure/Google Cloud or even an open(3)? Yes, migrating projects is a pain, but there has to be a point where it makes financial sense, and if not, what's the problem?

Does that mean I shouldn't buy a car because they might decide to raise gas prices?

Yes. Well, either gas prices will rise or some other way of disincentivising private car use will appear, or we'll have runaway climate change, and it'll be your fault.

You might buy an EV because ICEs are worse for the planet.

Point being, you have a problem that needs solved (transportation, cloud hosting). You can pick options which mitigate downsides imposed by your personal values (environmentalism, cloud vendor lockin). You don't have to stop driving.

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