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Comment by rco8786 | Hacker News Reader

Is that like, weird? How many companies are realistically hosting their compute/data across multiple providers for the sake of diversifying that risk? Certainly some, but a tiny minority right?

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It's not only about hosting across multiple providers for the sake of diversifying that risk.

It's an unhealthy situation to be fully dependent on 1 single provider. It creates monopolies (instead of diversity and choice) which means less freedom, and/or more corruption and unhealthy conditions for all involved.

No I get the concern. I’m asking how many companies are realistically mitigating that risk, today. Like why is RoJ being called out for it here, when building systems that are tightly tied to various cloud providers is a pretty common thing (and dare I say the risk is even a bit overblown).

It is part of some regulatory frameworks. I’ve met someone from an European insurance company once, who told me they have be be able to switch to a different hyperscaler in 24 hours.

I also think it’s generally a good business practice to keep the number of companies you depend upon as small as possible. Only being able to deploy to one cloud provider is like only having one customer. It can work, but it is risky.

I think it's more than you realize because it was more than I realized. It only takes getting burned by a cloud provider once to get the execs to notice, then they talk about lock-in, and the good ones try to avoid it. Plus, remember people move companies and take their knowledge with them. It's the kind of thing that gets talked about in CIO circles [0], so it's more than a tiny minority.

0. https://www.protocol.com/enterprise/target-cio-mike-mcnamara... (Disclaimer: I work for Target but not currently on cloud stuff, though did previously)

In contrast to provider-native serverless solutions, cloud agnostic solutions carry a high price tag for the entire application life cycle in form of operations - those people petting your k8s. A common misconception regarding serverless applications is focusing on compute alone and in that context an agnostic solution may seem lucrative after traffic reaches certain threshold, justifying running a cluster 24/7. However many scalable application architecturs benefit from asynchronous processing and event-driven models which require reliable messaging infrastructure with considerable operational overhead. This is where serverless applications utilizing managed services shine, making it possible for small teams to deliver very impressive things by outsourcing the undifferentiated ops work to AWS. On the other hand, if the compute layer is the only lock-in-inducing component in your architecture, a properly architected application is relatively easy to migrate to a serverful model. As a crude simplification, just replace the API Gateway with Express.

It’s not so much about actively using multiple providers, as building your application to be able to switch if you wanted.

Every startup I've worked for has had at least 3 data centers in different cities.

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