It's never about technology. It's about cost. If AWS ever priced themselves wildly above Azure or GCP or ___, shit would hit the fan.
Outside of that, who cares if you're locked into one cloud or another? Features? Maybe if you're super picky about Power BI or SQL Server? It's never made any sense to me.
S3 Lambdas look like a solid addition to AWS.
AWS is for privledged companies playing with silicon valley monopoly money based on made up "evaluations", most people don't have that benefit.
More companies are moving to the cloud from managed colo than the inverse. For example, companies like Uber and Adobe has been moving from their own datacenters to AWS. Even dinosaurs like Disney have moved to the cloud.
Anyone who saves a significant amount of money running their own DCs vs uses the cloud either has significant security requirements or is the in the business of selling infrastructure (ex. Dropbox)
Everyone is waking up to the "total cost" of software development. Market forces are forcing people to realize that developer time is the most valuable commodity there is.
Companies don't go to the cloud because they have silicon valley money to burn. They go to the cloud because every minute of their developer time that is not spent on development operations and maintainance of code that a cloud provider offers instead, is a minute they can spend on the core UNIQUE business proposition of the company.
You can bemoan the skills lost in our industry, but that always happened at every layer of abstraction in every technical industry.
Not every platform needs EC2 instances. Most can build on Lambdas, API Gateway, and S3.
Not sure what evidence supports this notion of billions and privilege. If anything, AWS has democratized entrepreneurial endeavors.
> If anything, AWS has democratized entrepreneurial endeavors.
More likely AWS simply made a lot of money on the race to the bottom (or top) with regards to an ever faster, fatter, fancier and shinier Web. (Now everyone needs a CDN, everyone needs many PoPs, because the market forces demand this. Of course the total costs are enormous, but due to the increased scale and decades of technological changes the unit costs have gone down.)
> Most can build on Lambdas, API Gateway, and S3.
Sure, and it's great if people are aware of what kind of workload to put where. And if they build in rate limits. Otherwise they will be surprised when they run into the classic gotchas of "how we burnt all of our seed money on AWS bills".
A simple colocated server nowadays can do almost a petabyte a month for less than $1000. Lookup how much that is on AWS.
Lambdas and s3 are cool until you get ddos'd and now owe way more money. Or, your software doesn't work with lambda, which is true of the overwhelming majority of services.
If you price right, then if you scale to the point you need it for ongoing costs, you'll have money to spend on the one-time cost of building an abstraction layer over any locked-in services and switching to that, enabling both a migration off and, potentially, its own resellable product.
If someone hosted an MP3 piracy site or torrent tracker or carding forum on AWS, it would likely terminated too, regardless of whether Amazon are ideologically against piracy.
If you're a big fish with powerfu rich users like Twitter, then vendor lock-in isn't a risk. If you're a small, inconsequential platform that can be smashed like a fly on the window, then you really need to care about such things.
Parler outright refused to delete posts calling for the mass killing of politicians, even when those posts were specifically pointed out to Parler by AWS. This is all detailed in court documents. AWS very patiently tried to prod Parler into following AWS's terms of service, but Parler refused. This is a very clear-cut matter and those suggesting otherwise are either trying to deceive or being misled.
Twitter also uses GCP, and Azure I’m sure. Their serving layer is not hosted by AWS though, and I’m reasonably certain AWS could not shut down Twitter immediately simply terminating their AWS account.
If you’re building something that a cloud provider might adopt or build their own, well, isn’t that risky regardless of the cloud provider element?
I know some companies avoid one provider or the other out of competitive concerns. That seems easily managed with contractual obligations.
Twitter has enabled some borderline illegal behavior, but the account holder has been the one at risk. I don’t think Twitter systematically allows illegal behavior like parler did.
https://aws.amazon.com/aup/: You may not use, or encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to use, the Services.. for any.. offensive use, or to transmit, store, display, distribute or otherwise make available content that is.. offensive.
What does offensive mean? Who defines it?
Does this sound libelous to you, and do you have evidence supporting this? Even AWS's response didn't allege Parler "systematically allowed illegal behavior".
The idea was to avoid vendor lock and make it "easy" to change the database engine.
A project was on, perhaps 2 years ago, still followed this pattern, but it ended up also adopting somewhere between 10 - 15 AWS services and we never discussed an abstraction layer on top of it.
There are one or two efforts now to create an independent layer on top of cloud services. I have a hard time understanding how that will work outside of basic services.
I have seen this fail in dozens of ways
I’m designing a system right now and I’m specifically not allowing it to become too ingrained into the AWS ecosystem so that I can easy move it to GCP, Azure, or elsewhere (would that Digital Ocean offered better support) if/when Amazon gets too big and starts to take advantage of their size. That will happen. It’s only a matter of time.