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Comment by Narkov | Hacker News Reader

Price increases are just one way you can get screwed. You can also lose out when your provider doesn't drop prices or pick up operating efficiencies that other providers have.

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And when has that happened with respect to either GCP, AWS or Azure at a level that it’s worth migrating?

Even if you have done everything in a “cloud agnostic” way, “infrastructure has weight”. Any large migration isn’t just technical , it involves project management, organization training, regression testing, compliance testing, security testing, architecture review boards, vendor negotiations, firewall changes, coordination with third parties who may only allow list certain IP addresses, data migration, etc.

Heck they often have multiple physical network connections to the cloud provider (Direct Connect)

Anyone who thinks they can run everything on K8s and they have “cloud agnosticism” has never done a very large scale migration.

You would be amazed how long it takes to do a bog standard lift and shift of a hundreds of plain jane VMs and VM hosted databases. You can’t get anymore cloud agnostic than that.

source: I’ve done a few over the years in both the “real world” and working in the cloud consulting department at AWS (Professional Services). I no longer work at AWS and have no specific loyalty to AWS.

The other thing I'd add is cloud agnosticism doesn't scale. If everyone were prepared for it, there wouldn't be enough elastic capacity with other cloud providers. You'd need enough reserved capacity in another cloud to pull it off, but I guarantee you finance will say "no." What makes the most sense is multi-region work since it's more cost effective, and it's the more likely failure scenario.

There usually isn’t enough elasticism if a region fails. You really even then need to have reserved capacity and maybe even a hot standby or active-active.

>And when has that happened with respect to either GCP, AWS or Azure at a level that it’s worth migrating?

Egress price makes it worth migrating away from those three.

You’ve never been the one neck to choke when things go wrong have you? If Billy Bob’s cloud provider goes down, you are going to constantly be blamed for making a poor decision. If anything goes wrong they are going to question your decision.

If you choose AWS (or Azure) and a region goes down - everyone else is down too. “No one ever got fired for choosing IBM”.

Choosing the most popular vendor - AWS, Salesforce, ServiceNow, or whatever vendor is in the upper right Gartner magic square quadrant never gets questioned by the powers that be.

Even if the alternate cloud provider goes offline for an entire day it still would be worth it financially compared to AWS because egress is so expensive there.

And you ignored the entire reply didn’t you? It’s naive to think at the “one neck to choke level” that all decisions are made for purely technical reasons.

And for you to just say “it’s okay to be down an entire day” because of egress cost tells me that you have never done infrastructure requirements analysis at scale.

First you have to assess the cost of being down for a period of time, then you have to access RTO, RPO requirements and not all workloads have high egress costs - especially things like data lakes that may have a lot of ingress and processing costs, but relatively low egress costs.

I’ve done a lot of different cloud projects over the years from lift and shifts, to data lakes, to cloud call centers, to serverless, to ETL jobs, you can’t just blindly repeat “egress costs” in a vacuum without understanding use cases.

I never claimed that it is always worth it to switch because of egress costs, but that egress costs are a reason to switch. If I ran my sites on AWS it would 100x the cost of running it.

These were your words

> Egress price makes it worth migrating away from those three.

> Even if the alternate cloud provider goes offline for an entire day it still would be worth it financially compared to AWS because egress is so expensive there.

You never qualified either with “in my particular use case”. If you had, I would have had no argument. I haven’t been flown into your company along with SAs, sales, project managers, etc for a week to do a proper “as-is” assessment and to see what your requirements are.

I haven’t accessed the competencies of your staff or determined what is your competitive advantage and what is the “undifferentiated heavy lifting” in your company.

I would never make any blanket statements without knowing your specific use case and automatically assume “cloud” is always the right or wrong answer

>And when has that happened with respect to either GCP, AWS or Azure at a level that it’s worth migrating?

This suggests you are looking for a single example where the pricing of the big 3 is compratively high compared to the competition at a point where it worth it to switch. I gave the example that the price of egress is one cost which is not competitive. If I had instead said that SQS was not competitive obviously that wouldn't matter to businesses that don't use it enough to make a difference.

I’m looking at it from more than just “cost of infrastructure”. You also have to consider reliability, managed vs unmanaged, the competencies and expertise of your team, organizational constraints whether you have a more or less static or dynamic workload…

Microsoft and AWS have versions of the “Cloud Adoption Framework”

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cloud-adoption-frame...

https://aws.amazon.com/cloud-adoption-framework/

And the TOGAF framework has something similar

https://pubs.opengroup.org/architecture/togaf9-doc/arch/chap...

I am saying when considering any “large” implementation there are a lot of considerations outside of infrastructure bills.

I’m not saying that every company should go cloud. But the “lenses” you have to look through are multifaceted

I’ve been in places where total AWS spend was a rounding error compared to revenue. Egress fees weren’t a top 10 cost and wasn’t worth optimizing for.

The bosses would’ve blamed me for choosing a tier 2/3 noname provider the first time a day of downtime happens. And they would’ve been right.

Egress prices make migrating away hard. But a lot of products don't need to push much data out of AWS, especially with VPC peering based products.

And for things like transferring data to and from S3 within AWS you use an S3 gateway endpoint so data stays within AWS’s network

Whilst there are some nice toys e.g. Spanner, there's generally little other reason to tolerate the abusive pricing of 'the cloud' ime

That's a long-term concern, though. The thing to worry about is a rug-pull, but no major provider will do that. They could, but they won't.

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