Meanwhile AWS is growing at 20%/year, Azure at 33% and GCP at 35%. That doesn't seem compatible with any kind of major cloud repatriation trend.
I am not anti-cloud and pro cloud. My major problem with the new trend is that a lot of people are basically rediscovering pre "Cloud" era. which is VPS, Dedicated server and Colocation. And people are suggesting Hetzner or OVH or many other players are equivalent to AWS. While I dont disagree AWS is charging a lot for their offering, putting AWS to other services isn't even a valid comparison.
Completely ignoring the basics such as Server / CPU / RAM / SSD quality. Network quality such as interconnect, redundancy, as well as Data Center quality. If you rally want to do simple price and spec comparison you might as well go to Lowendbox to find a low cost VPS which some people have been doing since 2008.
I really wish there is a middle ground somewhere before using Hyperscalers. Both DO / Linode couldn't reach a larger scale. Hetzner is expanding their Cloud offering only and no dedicated outside EU.
Although to be fair, most hobbyists only need basic services like cloud servers/VMs, and hyperscalers like AWS are an awful deal compared to other options if you only need compute + storage + bandwidth. You don't need to use S3, Lambdas and Cloudfront to host a personal blog, a simple VPS will be more than enough.
It feels like most devs nowadays prefer using services that abstract away the infrastructure, at the cost of not developing SysOps skills, so I don't see a future where the Cloud is going to lose relevance.
But I think the argument is - do they need to be? How much of the services of AWS (Google/azure/etc) are really needed by the majority of customers?
For companies that need hyperscaling services, I get it. There are definite benefits to the cloud when operating at extremes (auto scaling up and down). But for the majority of workloads, I think you could be well served by a more barebones offering.
Very many. And none of them are EC2 (or its equivalent). Any service that comes with the consumption based charging (i.e. no 24x7 running costs whether it is used or not) and offers a clearly defined functional feature, has plenty of appeal to cloud customers. Another part of the appeal is the mix and match nature of mature cloud platforms: the customers get substantial freedom to choose from services they can instantly start using, or roll (and maintain) their own albeir at a higher cost.
I.e. if the customer wants a queue, they get a queue, and nothing else. The cloud platform abstracts away and takes care of the underlying platform that «runs» the queue and eliminates the operational overhead that comes with having to look after the message broker that provides the said queue. There are other many examples.
Some companies want the space to grow into it. At my job, we just started getting into video decoding. AWS has elastic video processing services. Where as DO would cost way more to setup those services on our own.
While there are valid use-case where you get value from the extra services the hyperscaller are providing, most of the time people go for AWS “because everybody does it” or because the choice was made by a consulting company that doesn't pay the final cloud bill and is optimizing their own added value at the expenses of the customer's one.
I've been doing freelance work for 7 years now for roughly two dozens if companies of various size, and I can't tell you how many massively underused AWS / Azure VPS I've seen, but it's more than half the cloud bills of the said companies (or division for big companies since I obviously only had the vision on the division I worked for and not the whole company).
I think it was mentioned in the article what AWS offers. Lock-in.
So do DO, OVH, Hetzner, Azure, GCP, Oracle, IBM etc. Every cloud platform comes with a hard lock-in.
So far with Ubicloud, you get virtual machines, load balancers, private networking, managed PostgreSQL, all with encryption at rest and in-transit. The Ubicloud managed service uses Hetzner bare metal as one of its hosting providers, which cuts costs 2x - 10x compared to AWS/Azure. Would love to hear any feedback if you'd like to give it a try, or go through the repo here: https://github.com/ubicloud/ubicloud
Are all the bits and pieces necessary for starting one's own managed service open source? In case somebody is interested in starting their own commercial cloud. How easy would that be to deploy?
I'm just a home labber and I've run OpenStack via kolla-ansible for like 7 years now, and Ceph since the jewel release I think almost 8 years ago for storage. Both are pretty easy to manage.
I had no issues with Hetzner's component and especially network quality for a decade now. Before that, yeah, there could be some hiccups and issues. But they stopped being issues a long time ago. And really, what hardware issues do you expect on this hardware:
https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/brands/matrix-d...
They didn't save a whole lot of money from it (they aren't spending a whole lot on it anyway), and now their business ever so slightly loses focus. Not to mention, as you said, the quality aspects. Cloud gives you many things "for free" (like local disk RAID, network and power redundancy, datacenter compliance, in-transit and on-disk encryption, optimized OS images, overall network security, controls around what their employees can do - that $5/month lowendbox provider from Romania is almost certainly logging into your VM and going through your files) which you lose when going to a "pre-cloud" provider.
if this approach to DC compliance/security/redundancy is good enough for the world's financial services industry then it's probably good enough for everyone else too
(but yes, then only saves about 90% of the cost instead of 95%)
Isn’t most of that just S3 storage/bandwidth?
It doesn't work out well if you just create some long lived EC2 instances and call it a day. But that's not really using a cloud, just a VPS - and that has indeed never been cheaper than having your own servers. You need to go cloud native if you want to save money.
If you said 2 times I'd think it's overestimated but okay, let's not dwell on details. 3x is bullshit and so is the rest.
Perhaps you're comparing apples and oranges - yes, it's possible to do a much less capable on-premise deployment that will obviously cost much less. But if we're comparing comparable - just the internet subscription you'd need in your DC to match the AWS offer in availability, connectivity and stability would make any egress costs pale in comparison. Saying this as someone who used to run a hosting company with 3000 servers before the clouds made it obsolete.
And lastly, yes - paying people to do stuff for you usually costs more than time and materials. If you fuck it up, it's up to you to fix it. If AWS fucks it up, you're compensated for it - part of the price are guarantees that are impossible to get with a DIY deployment. Maybe you don't need it, so choose accordingly - a cheaper hosting provider, or even the less capable on premise. But matching the cloud offer all by yourself is not going to be cheaper than the cloud unless you're on AWS scale.
Yeah, maybe "AWS partner" can give a discount but I bet it'd be 10% for most, or maybe 30% tops. This won't turn $7K into $36.
Cloudflare networking solution doesn't nearly match - and to be fair, they're not trying - what AWS offers. Cloudflare is a small, focused service; AWS is enterprise universal do everything and stay secure&compliant while doing it solution that has the entire Cloudflare offering included and it's not even a big part of AWS. Don't conflate the two - use whatever is better for your use case, budget/margin, risk profile, reliability requirements etc, but each has some and the price is justified.
And sure, Cloudflare does not have all the breath of Amazon services, but I find it hard to justify $60 vs $6000 price difference. Amazon egress is simply incredibly overpriced, and any price-sensitive company should avoid using it.
It's quite easier to mess up in a hyperscaling cloud because it's extremely forgiving. In a different setting you wouldn't be able to make as many mistakes and would have to stop the world and fix the issue.
My organisation is feeling it now and while our cloud environment isn't fully optimised it has been designed with cost in mind.
Using opex to make up for otherwise unjustifiable capex is suitable only in the beginning or if you need the latest servers every six (or whatever) months
> Amazon WorkDocs is a document storage, collaboration, and sharing system. Amazon WorkDocs is fully managed, secure, and enterprise scale.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/workdocs/latest/developerguide/w...
One has an issue with the platform-enforced HTTP timeout maximum values.
I migrated that app back to a VM in an hour.
It turns out that the “integration” for something like App Service (or CloudRun or whatever) is mostly just best practices for any kind of hosting: parameters read from environment variables, immutable binaries with external config, stateless servers, read only web app folders, monitoring with APMs, etc…
Sure, you’ll experience lockin if you use Durable Functions or the similar Lambda features… but no worse than any other workflow or business rules platform.
Ask people how easy it is to get off BizTalk or MuleSoft…
Most real workloads I've seen (at 3 startups, and several teams at Amazon) have utilization under 10%.
I worked at a very small startup years ago that leaned heavily on EC2. Our usage was pretty bipolar, the service was along the lines of a real-time game so we either had a very heavy work load or nothing. We stood up EC2 instances when games were lice and wound them down after.
We did use Lambda for a few things, mainly APIs that were rarely used or for processing jobs in an event queue.
Serverless has its place for sure, but in my experience it have been heavily over used the last 3-5 years.
And you only need to get utilization up to like 15% to make reserved instances significantly better than lambda.
AEC software providers all do this. ProjectWise is worse than owning or renting a plain file server in every way I can imagine, yet every consultant in transportation dutifully cuts Bentley a five-figure check or larger every year so they can hold your project files hostage and pretend to develop software.
I pray for a merciful asteroid to end it all.
For Google, I'm not aware of a reliable way of estimating the GCP vs. Workspace numbers. But they get asked it during earnings calls, and the answer has always been that the GCP growth is substantially faster than the Workspace growth.
Is GEICO a major enterprise
"At the moment we have somewhere between 20-25 servers in each cab, or about 90 servers in each site. Here’s what the rack layout looks like in Chicago, for instance."
- https://dev.37signals.com/37signals-datacenter-overview/
Their "server count" is definitely much higher than what you are thinking.
Looking at cloud infrastructure today it is very easy for organizations to lose sight on production vs frivolous workloads. I happen to work for an automation company that has cloud infrastructure monitoring deployed such that we get notified about the resources we've deployed and can terminate workloads via ChatOps. Even though I know that everyone in the org is continuously nagged about these workloads I still see tons of resources deployed that I know are doing nothing or could be commingled on an individual instance. But, since the cloud makes it easy to deploy we seem to gravitate towards creating a separation of work efforts by just deploying more.
This is/was rampant in every organization I've been a part of for the last decade with respect to cloud. The percentage of actual required, production workloads in a lot of these types of accounts is, I'd gather, less than 50% in many cases. And so I really do wonder how many organizations are just paying the bill. I would gather the Big cloud providers know this based on utilization metrics and I wonder how much cloud growth is actually stagnant workloads piling up.
Asset management is always poor, but thats half because control over assets ends up being wrestled away from folks by "DevOps" or "SREs" making K8S operators that just completely fuck up the process. The other half is because they also want "security controls" and ensure that all the devs can't see any billing information. How can I improve costs if I can't tell you the deltas between this month and last?
Agreed. I don't think this is a real trend, at least not right now.
Also, fwiw, I'm really not a fan of these types of articles that identify like a small handful of people or organizations doing something different and calling it a "trend".
Revolutions cannot start huge, they must start small.
Forcing people to use OneDrive surely has an effect. /s