Just another example that a free market does not always ensure healthy competition and some times intervention is needed to level the playing field.
If you drank to cloud kool-aid from the beginning you kind of get used to huge costs for simple services so it's easier for your brain to justify paying 10k a month for a simple web app deployed in kubernetes, using cosmos db and any other number of services.
I've seen many companies that started on the cloud and their core architecture is so interleaved with the cloud that it would a huge investment to reduce that dependency and switch.
I see this spouted a lot, but my recent (last 6 months?) experience with AWS is that unless I pay up front to reserve a tonne of high end instances that I don’t necessarily need today, but might need tomorrow, I’m regularly running into capacity issues where I cannot spin up new instances of the metal that I want, and AWS support confirms they just don’t have the capacity unless we pay to reserve it up front.
At that point, it’s no different to running my own DC, where I already have 3 months of runway on my server pipeline anyway.
The risk of doing the same with high end instances is a different story.
Low risk & high margin products make for a highly profitable business. High risk and lower margin products less so.
Their target audience is people that can be equally well served by digital ocean and their ilk, but are happy to pay the Amazon premium.
It’s a good business model for Amazon, and a terrible value proposition for the customer who may not know better, and thinks they’re paying to de-risk their potential future growth requirements. The cost of migrating out then becomes prohibitive (both in technical hours and egress fees), so you like it or lump it, but either way, you likely just wait and/or pay Amazon more.
Until you can’t.
The magic if there is 1 is not the scale but the free credits. Startups can go years without paying and then it's all too late.
Scale is meaningless when it costs 10x more. Just have spare capacity and lots of it.
Here is an experiment - tell your employer you will be hosting on (insert no-name provider here), to same a literal million dollars, and see if you can get security team to sign off on it.
Here is another experiment - reach out to he security team, and tell them AWS costs are too high, ask them which providers they will be ready and willing to sign off. My guess is it will not be a big list beyond AWS/Azure/GCP.
So the market is not competitive at all, most of us cannot switch providers even if the alternative would be 100x better.
PS: I am not saying security team are assholes, I am pointing out a major barrier to competition.
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/datacentred-is-sh...
tl;dr even after getting a big public sector contract, a UK based cloud provider was killed off after scaling to meet demand which was then withdrawn. Attaining - and keeping - scale is extremely difficult. And that was just IaaS provision.
Anyways, big corps aren't the only player. There's plenty of SMEs that don't care the slightest about using only the big clouds.
> Here is an experiment - tell your employer you will be hosting on (insert no-name provider here), to same a literal million dollars, and see if you can get security team to sign off on it.
???
So what does this have to do with the security team at all? There is no "barrier" in that sense.
In the past we've had more non-cloud engineers than cloud. Using your experiment, if you told your IT team you wanted to move to the cloud (back then) to save a million dollars - do you think they'd sign off on it? No.
Who signed off on it? The bosses that believed in the "hype".
Who's in control and who has power? If the bosses want it to happen it will even if it doesn't make sense. They have the ability to fire the security team if they said no. Just like how ethical AI teams get fired...
The barrier is those in power still believe in the "hype" and don't know otherwise.
I met a CTO of a startup sometime ago that moved their entire operations from GCP to AWS because they were "more familiar with it". That's all.
Without knowing which startup you are referring to its hard to make a judgement as to the quality of the decision but you should not discount the role tooling familiarity has when developing software.
No 1 was familiar with the cloud when it 1st came out.
As to this scenario, clearly the whole company was running GCP so everyone minus the new CTO would be familiar with GCP vs something else.
Point exactly being that regardless of the security team or the developers - this familiarity that you mention or any other trait only applies to a select few in management.
SOCS/PCI/etc is going to take maybe $100-200k. If you can save a million dollars you should do it. Hire an expert if you have to. Serious.
I think it probably won't save you a million dollars, because I think all of the cloud vendors are priced with just enough profit to make sure of it, but if you know something I'd like to know about it.
I’m assuming you already adhere to the relevant standards. Obviously if you’re cutting corners getting up to snuff is going to cost a lot more than a hundy.
Profit margins on cloud computing are insanely high (at least, relative to my expectations). They basically have no interest in anything with less than a 15% margin, even at the massive scale they operate at. Certain products have triple-digit margins. Even if they are the minority, I don't think we can give them a pass with claims of "just enough profit".
This is the old unpopular Hayek/Friedman “classic liberal” position, that markets and industry should be heavily regulated and taxed.
I think people are confused thinking free market means no regulation. No regulation leads to monopoly which is the furthest from a free market you can possibly get. People who seriously advocate for such things are ignorant fools. There are countless examples of how markets fail and that's why every major economy in the world has a government.
In socialism/communism all sectors become state monopolies, with no market incentive to provide a decent service, nor to compensate workers fairly.
Unless you are talking about the theoretical "pure communism" which is fiction/fancy and we may as well be talking about utopia.
It makes sense with this being an American site, and most Americans think that Socialism is essentially the same thing as Communism (but then why define them as separate things?).
Community, Cooperative, Employee owned are all forms of socialism. None of them prevent competition.
> no market incentive to provide a decent service, nor to compensate workers fairly.
If you owned part of the company you worked for, you would be more likely to provide good service as that would then have repeat business and would directly financially impact you. The performance of the business is the only way you would get paid and as there are no shareholders the company would compensate rather than dividend.
Your comment makes absolutely no sense, socialism doesn't prevent free markets.
"Community, Cooperative, Employee owned" are all concepts that can (and do) exist under a capitalist regime.
Socialism is very different, and it does prevent free markets.
This is fundamentally wrong.
You should probably read about it before making statements that make you look foolish.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism
Socialism is about social not state ownership of the means of production. This does not prevent the state being involved either, and even then they can be a joint-stock corporation's.
A socialist regime, like the USSR, North Korea, or Mao's China would have state ownership. The founding fathers of modern socialist thought (e.g. Marx) would define socialism in terms of state ownership of the means of production.
But feel free to muddy the waters if you prefer to avoid concrete definitions.