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Comment by cs702 | Hacker News Reader

AWS really is the new IBM.

These days, no one gets fired for choosing AWS, and people get hired for knowing how to work with AWS.

Instead of you paying IBM to run your "mainframe" infrastructure, you pay AWS to run your "cloud" infrastructure. It's the same kind of service, with the same kind of economics, but under a different guise. AWS even offers an "on-premises cloud" solution for large customers.

As was the case with IBM at its peak, once you start using AWS's alphabet soup of ancillary services that work only on AWS, switching away from AWS becomes about as easy and enjoyable as replacing all the plumbing in a skyscraper.

Azure is the main alternative. There's always a #2.

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There was a sort of "golden age" for cloud in I'd say 2016-2019 where elastic compute was merged with traditional IT and Admin skillsets to create flexible fleets of servers and wrangle them all with Chef/Puppet, Ansible, or Terraform.

Now I feel like the pendulum has swung waaay too far. And I say this as an engineer who once worked for AWS. Of course you can still use EC2/ECS to do this sort of setup, but it seems everyone is oh so eager to throw everything onto Lambda and Fargate and completely abstract away the machine to the point where you have no insight or control as to what is running your application. It's absolute madness - it's like when my mother was programming on mainframes in the 70s/80s except instead of a batch of punch cards it's zipped files of python and js

At this point I find even running your own Kubernetes cluster to be more palatable than serverless solutions. With that at least you can still have some control into what's going on.

I disagree. As a one person shop that doesn't have the time for server maintenance, shifting to lamdas and fargate saved me a lot of headaches. Add in RDS and i now do nothing other than back up my database off-AWS occasionally. There are things I used to think I needed control over but really, who cares where its running as long as its up.

I would say it's a close call between MS and AWS in terms of who is the new IBM.

I see them both equally safe in terms of "won't get fired" at this point, although Azure maybe was risky as recent as 3 years ago, they seem stable now.

MS seems to have more of that super sticky engagement with customers that IBM had. Our MS tech teams seem unable to use technology from another vendor. Those on AWS like it and prefer it since it's familiar, but seem more adept at leveraging other technology commercial or open source. That super lock in MS has seems very IBM like to me?

It's a close race for sure.

Maybe they are both IBM, at different points in IBM's history?

cloud liberated us from thinking in terms of data centers. it taight usbthe abstractions seeing compute, storage, and bandwidth as fungible utilities.

the next wave of innovation could come from compnies like iExec and FileBase who offer storage and lambda-like utility.

the cost, allocation, and delivery is governed in a decentralized manner.

the value accrues to the network where you uave a vote.

interesting times ahead when thinking of a post-cloud-lockin world

I don't think this exactly the same. The "no one got fired for choosing IBM" was a derogatory statement. It wasn't uncommon that you got some significant discount for related products and so businesses would have a blanket policy that if IBM provided a solution you were required use it _even if you knew the solution was worse or wouldn't work._ Doesn't work? You're not going to get fired because you "had no choice."

You can argue with price or the peculiarities of a service or that AWS is taking over the world, but I have never seen them use contracts to force effectively companies to comply.

In my experience - Azure is the alternative when it's primarily a Windows-based shop. A lot of legacy applications typically run on Azure since companies do "lift-and-shift".

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