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Comment by empath75 | Hacker News Reader

AWS, Facebook and amazon are going to get absolutely crushed if there’s a recession that triggers a tech industry pullback. All the VC funding that goes to these hot tech companies goes to Facebook and google for ads and AWS for server space.

In addition, kubernetes is going to start squeezing aws’s profit margins, particularly ec2 as people move to commodity k8s hosting.

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Is the implication that people/businesses will stop developing and using web services? I just don't see how we can go back now. Further, web tech is cheaper to scale than anything else, so when the wallet tightens it seems that's where budgets would focus.

Also, AWS moves faster than web tech on the whole, so even if the general shift to k8s continues, AWS will be there to make it easier than rolling your own, and at a price point that's "worth it."

Historically, teams would just make their existing servers last longer. Considering most of AWS premium services have an open source alternative, guessing most people will port to containers. Built on open source has been their source of strength but is also their achilles heel. They shortened the learning curve on to their platform and off of it.

That's a complete no-sense. When you buy from a public cloud you buy reliability, availability, security and support.

The service layer is just an add-on. Part of their premium. Even if you go full open source you still need infrastructure to run it and that's exactly what companies don't want to do and won't do anymore, and the reason why AWS and Azure are massively successful.

I think I must have miscommunicated my position. I'm not reflecting on cloud as whole, but how AWS is particularly vulnerable to a tech sector downturn. In the event of economic downturn, existing cloud customers will optimized costs (pre-cloud they would have avoided infrastructure upgrades, now they will focus on different cost structures). My belief is that generic services, such as storage, compute, ect. will priced like commodities because the market is more efficient since multiple cloud provider have the same service. Tools like terraform allow easy enough cloud configuration porting that cloud providers have little pricing power for these products. One area of cost optimization is to utilize generic cloud resources instead of AWS specific services (where I see many of my costs). Many of the services that generate positive cashflow for AWS seem to be built on top of open source which means that converting existing costly services can be converted to use generic resources with out too much implementation difficulty.

I'm only a developer so I'm sure I'm missing Operations and Business perspectives. Would love to learn more.

Those positive cash flow services are managed. It’s cheaper to run your own Postgres instance in EC2 than it is to run RDS, until you have to pay someone to operationalize it.

You pay $.09 an hour more for an RDS m5.large than you do for an EC2 m5.large. What kind of DBA can you get for $67 a month? That’s maybe one hour of a good DBA’s time per month, tops.

Now, someone will correctly point out that you can run way more compute on a colo’d server than an EC2 instance and they’d be right. But when you realize you’re paying AWS for hypervisor patching, network automation - I’ve worked in places where a security group change in AWS was equivalent to a two week servicenow ticket with the network team - ...

The business perspective to AWS is that you bake operational costs into the product and stop paying people that generate those costs. Not good for sysadmins who aren’t willing to change, but it’s where we are. And it’s why you can’t just say “open source makes this convertible without difficulty” - somebody’s still gotta manage those services ;)

The myth that Teraform makes cloud migration easy needs to die.

Have you looked at the different TF provisioners? They are all provider specific.

There are a lot of services on AWS that are specific to AWS that you would need to rearchitect your system to use. Even something as simple as an ETL process that lets you load directly from S3 into Redshift and Aurora.

Sorry, how is k8s getting more widespread cut into ec2 nodes? (if anything k8s needs a bit more nodes)

k8s allows for more complete utilization of nodes, and scaling out smaller cheaper nodes instead of scaling up bigger more expensive ones

Do you have any link handy to elaborate on this? Because when I create a K8s cluster I define their size and number (and autoscale, same as with AWS autoscale), I don’t know how k8s can spin up smaller nodes in a different way than say, AWS

I'm not the original poster, but I think they were suggesting that K8s supports better bin packing than you get with virtual machines, so you can run the same applications on fewer (or smaller) servers.

In terms of the cutting edge of bringing "declarative, Kubernetes-style APIs to cluster creation, configuration, and management" see https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/cluster-api

There is a lot more to AWS than just EC2.

Large companies want to move their databases storage and compute off prem ASAP. Any tech/economy pullback should only accelerate that.

It's too easy to steal market share with software. There are no moats. Kubernetes is the first of many equalisers, crossplane.io is next. There's no monopoly effect.

That's an absolute fantasy. I've worked at companies who tried to move between cloud providers.

Unless you build your service like that from the start (e.g.: prematurely optimize, which practically no successful company has the chance to do), you will experience some amount of AWS lock-in.

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