Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

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After this talk [0] I had several most interesting conversations with media folks about the real cost and advantages of "cloud".

One thing that came up is development. Modern devops culture is quite a good thing, and what's lovely about "cloud" - as in the ability to quickly buy compute and storage capability - is that ideas you would have tinkered with in on-prem labs (or across private sites) for months can be imagined and prototyped in hours.

I'm a big advocate of rapid prototyping as a _huge_ business lever, because the ability to try out ideas quickly, to easily reconfigure things, is the key for time to market. You can quickly see if something is going to fly or not.

And that's where the advantage ends.

After that, it's all downhill. Asymmetry. Lock-in and portability. Trust and privacy issues. Security perimeters. Unpredictable costs....

So the way forward is to render unto Caesar only the things that are Caesar's.... in other words, take the advantages of "cloud" when it suits you, and then get the hell out of Dodge.

What is ongoing from that conversation is media companies being interested in strategic planning to build, and even share, their own distributed computing resources to pull back to once a technology is off the ground.

Someone even mentioned that it's time for a European Cloud initiative,

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OL2XmlgpdA

Yeah it's interesting devops is a lock-in on the cloud when (if you squint, a lot) it should be the opposite: there are devops tools that .... almost ... should make you more independent.

IMO it should be a sneaky powerful declaration by major corps that your app should be built to be deployed nearly at will on at least two clouds. I mean terraform is so tantalizingly close to it, until it isn't. This is like Bezos sending out the "thou shalt service everything".

AWS knows this and they are all about lock-in. They want you on the more complicated products, because those are really hard to move off of. Oh yes, don't use cassandra, use dynamo. Man you'll never move off that.

So if you let the devs have "you can develop on AWS" but then they have to deploy on Hetzner ... that will force the devs to be far more cloud-independent. I guess if I was a CIO (never let me become one) I'd try to institute that.

> I'm a big advocate of rapid prototyping as a _huge_ business lever, because the ability to try out ideas quickly, to easily reconfigure things, is the key for time to market. You can quickly see if something is going to fly or not. And that's where the advantage ends.

Too many businesses aren’t even properly utilising that key advantage. They’re moving servers to the cloud but still using their outdated development and deployment processes, and things move just as slowly in the cloud as they used to on prem. They know what Infrastructure as Code means, but only as separate words.

    They’re moving servers to the cloud but still using their outdated development and deployment processes, and things move just as slowly in the cloud as they used to on prem.

For many non-tech corps, the purpose of moving to cloud is to downsize IT admin staff. It works well.

nah, not really. we hoped it would. it didn't.

your sysadmins are now Cloud Admins and can get an extra 50k in the market with a GCP or AWS certs. you're going to bump up their salary, right?

the useless offshore team is now a Cloud useless offshore team, and also wants their 20% bump. And bet your ass that Tata or Cognizant will get blood from a stone to make it happen, cuz as useless as they may seem you still need them.

change control meetings haven't gone anywhere, and if anything they're more important since now your entire infrastructure is a long one-liner away from being borked; cloud is an API, basically. just because you're not racking and stacking doesn't mean the demand, architecture & design, review boards, implementations, and due diligence steps go faster.

now we need an entirely new strategy to handle costs, since our architects and procurement can't track day to day cost changes easily, so when SuperDev decides he's going to #yolo 6 VMs and a few dozen containers into existence to test a few things we now have launch a technical and financial investigation into 1) how that happened, and 2) how much it cost.

still gotta use fortigates or palo altos, and internal networking hasn't changed too much overall; lean teams to begin with.

so in exchange for shoveling huge quantities of OpEx to companies that don't deserve more money, we don't really cut labor, and lose control of practically every other facet of our infra. Hope that Azure AD doesn't fail again, cuz the dashboard says 100% green but nothing is working and the execs are concerned.

What do you mean by asymmetry?

Maybe the most demonstrable is egress/ingress bandwidth. But since there's a power asymmetry when dealing with mega-corporations I had other asymmetries in mind too.

The cloud providers are so large that they don’t really need you. It’s all about churn management at the macro level. With hardware and software, there’s always an end of quarter leverage point.

I spent most of my career in large enterprises. The leverage you have against AWS or Microsoft is 0 compared to the old days. They are probably landing more infrastructure every month than my global company had in datacenters 15 years ago.

I feel like a lot of that shifted now.

You can just have on-premise k8s and keep most of the velocity gained from developers being able to "just run stuff" instead of anything having to go thru sysadmins.

You can just rent few servers off OVH to start and not have to worry about actual hardware, while still being few times cheaper than cloud.

Yeah you won't have access to the slew of cloud services and will have to deploy your own database but with amount of readily available code and software to do it it doesn't really slow down experimenting all that much

> You can just have on-premise k8s

You can deploy bare k8s, but then you'd figure that you need a lot more, starting with a load balancer (luckily there is MetalLB).

It's all possible, but not simple.

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