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Comment by andrewstuart | Hacker News Reader

“Moving Forward. Starting today, I will be making plans to move everything to AWS.” I laughed when I read this because it’s presenting moving to AWS as a completely different future.

The industry has moved beyond depending on a single cloud computing vendor. It’s negligent to put all your eggs in one basket.

I would say don’t put your business in the hands of a single cloud vendor. Either exit the cloud or go multi cloud or run plain old Linux machines on hetzner or ionos. Design your systems to withstand your credit card expiring, or missing an email.

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I disagree.

I’ve hosted on AWS for ages. They don’t do this. We didn’t pay the bill for two months once because the owner of the card left. No problems. This was a small spender outfit. They could have thrown us on the street as we were a rounding error. Now we’re a big spender and we still forgot to pay them sometimes (sorry Bezos)

But some of your point is worth considering. Design for portability should the worst happen (you are cut off due to geopolitics or other problems) or somewhere else turns out to be a better deal. Stick to IaaS and portable services only.

For the moment I trust AWS though.

How did Russian companies mitigate the effects of cloud services hosting being blocked by sanctions

Mostly by migrating to other countries.

Judging by my friends' experience, they were never really popular inside the country. For those building projects aimed at internal audience, local companies were preferred for tax or legal reasons, and most of those working on international projects quickly emigrated to more sane countries.

The difference is when something goes wrong at AWS someone picks up the phone, fixes your stuff, apologizes profusely, and give you a credit.

Mutlicloud is great but somewhat complicated to setup correctly.

The value add of AWS is that Amazon has unusually good customer service.

It's, to some degree, built into the ethos of the company. Jeff Bezos' "customer obsession" mantra is quoted by professors in every MBA program from Arizona to Zagreb. Case-in-point, here's a compilation of him expressing it from 1999 to 2018: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIrhVU04GHc

Amazon may not be particularly customer centric in terms of the products they allow on their market place, or AWS by the plate of spaghetti that is their various cloud offering, but their customer service division is great. You can get in contact with them in hours, and there's never a hesitation to give you refunds or credit if something goes wrong; something I can't say the same of when it comes to Microsoft or Google.

I guess there's basically 3 approaches to customer service:

1. Excellent customer service, that tries to make the customer as happy as possible, within reason.

Amazon seems to be the big example of this one.

2. Terrible customer service, that has a hostile attitude towards the customer.

I'm not sure who's a good example here. Comcast?

3. Non-existent customer service.

This approach has been made famous by Google.

There's certainly a spot between 1 and 2; one where the customer service that exists is reasonable, but horribly under-funded and under-appreciated by the business. I'd say half of all businesses fall into that bucket.

I know when I call my insurance or bank that I'll mostly get things sorted, however I need to jump through 101 hoops to get to the right person via a automated service. Stop being cheap and just hire some operators to wire you through to the right people. It's not terrible per-se, just some combination of good (helpful customer service reps) and bad (automated operator).

> The industry has moved beyond depending on a single cloud computing vendor.

Given how much of the industry struggles when an AWS region goes down, this seems... unlikely.

How about “the industry should have moved beyond depending on a single cloud computing vendor.”?

It's pretty cost-prohibitive.

(... yes, more cost-prohibitive than losing one or two days of business to a SNAFU).

That is a big difference from what you said.

The reality is that all serious outfits either host on AWS, or keep some level of AWS account at the ready, in addition to bare metal Linux servers in colos or hosting providers that they can move onto if needed.

Your statement is confusing simplicity and flexibility with multi-cloud. No one wants to deal with the confusing mix of random hosted services that 3 different cloud providers try to sell you, with one of them (Google Cloud) being this opaque horror story that the article is talking about.

Host on AWS, and mostly host your services on EC2. It's dead simple to migrate elsewhere if needed. You will likely never need to.

Our company tried that and was huge waste of time. Resulted in us wasting a lot of time trying to make our stuff "generic" so we could switch off of AWS if we ever wanted to. Eventually 1+ years later someone finally realized how much time we were wasting designing for some hypothetical event that they finally told us to stop doing that and fully utilize AWS directly.

AWS might be up for others but could have locked you out

us-east-1, it's always us-east-1

Don't host production stuff in there. And if you must, have a backup somewhere.

What is the evidence this is true? I tend to agree with https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/multi-cloud-is-the-worst-...

> The industry has moved beyond depending on a single cloud computing vendor. It’s negligent to put all your eggs in one basket.

In that case, the vast majority of enterprises are negligent.

> > The industry has moved beyond depending on a single cloud computing vendor. It’s negligent to put all your eggs in one basket.

> In that case, the vast majority of enterprises are negligent.

Vast majority of enterprises are not mission critical and their products don't need guaranteed downtime lower than 1min per year. What they need is a lower price, because people don't care about quality in that case but about costs.

Well Said

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