Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that lots of people seem to be under the impression that they are doing it right because they are using AWS. They don't realize that AWS is a toolbox, not a 'ready made solution for redundancy against all catastrophes you are possibly exposed to'. They use that to their advantage by pricing such solutions at a level that people will either pay through the nose or will be left without recourse when AWS loses their data. It's stupid, but at the same time these beliefs are surprisingly wide spread.

View on HN

Yep, a lot of non-technical leaders believe that 'cloud' is synonymous with 'DR strategy' or even 'backup'. "We won't have to worry about being offline if our server goes down if we move to the cloud!" Some of these people fundamentally don't understand what the cloud is, their assumption is cloud means easy button that solves all your infrastructure and uptime problems.

You are pointing the fingers at the wrong people. Cloud providers pushed this idea onto executives via their marketing and conferencing channels.

Not disimilar to how AI naratives are pushed on executives these last two years.

But alongside the marketing blitz they also offer certifications for people who are supposed to execute these projects. Even the most foundational certification exam -- which simply tests your recall on what AWS service is for compute versus networking -- teaches and tests you about "Shared Responsibility Model" that draws the line at what the customer is still responsible for when they use cloud bases IaaS / PaaS / SaaS services.

If businesses are going to cloud but without engaging / listening to competent people who know these basics -- then the blame needs to be somewhat pointed back at those very business leaders I feel.

This is not obscure magical knowledge either that is tightly controlled. Any cloud vendor will freely teach you that. Or even a google search would.

Who is a CEO going to believe? Amazon, Microsoft and the entire IT infra division or that lone SRE who disagrees with them?

I mean, every time cloud comes up on HN we see legions of techies posting strowman arguments about why you should offload everything onto AWS, GCP, Azure, etc.

Aws cto is basically opening every presentation with a everything breaks all the time slide, idk where you get that idea they oversell the cloud resilience

They could offer controlled "failure of service" service where they randomly take stuff offline and you have to pay to get it back if you don't have a backup/recovery strategy.

AWS Fault Injection Service

https://aws.amazon.com/fis/

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/fis/latest/userguide/what-is.htm...

The customer CEO never watched that presentation.

No. If you're the leader you should know what you're leading. It's literally the job.

But the problem is right there: "non-technical" leaders. Never work for one if you can avoid it.

All Tesla employees reading this are fervently agreeing, between their tears.

"We should build vacuum delivery tubes for passengers!"

You just have to take a look at the Rube Goldberg-esque abomination that is the AWS web interface for a few minutes to realize that it's not that simple. Granted, most executives won't do that...

Or encounter their CLI and it's lovecraftian combination of positional arguments, named arguments, piping, json documents, etc, distributed largely by random lot, as far as I can tell.

And for a time, it even seems true as long as the natural disasters that impact various customer offices happen to not impact that one particular data center…

I mean, can't cloud kinda solve all of those if you just use the right things?

If I were a bit more bloody-minded I would launch a service for vibe-coded apps that, under the hood, did everything "the right way" and just charged a flat fee + percent on the underlying.

I feel like if this was done correctly it would eat a bunch of the market, but I question how many people are actually willing to pay for "the right way". The last time I had that experience it was with Heroku which was quite a leaky abstraction.

I think a lot of people have built those services. But doing it right is more expensive, and people end up choosing the $5-$10/mo option over your $30/mo+ that does it right. Multiply those numbers by whatever multiple you want for higher end stuff.

And the LLM say: "You're absolutely right! We didn't need jaggederest's service. We can build it easily."

Well, one of the things I would be very, very focused on is LLM optimization, so that is something that could be mitigated, at least. Especially since I would be building with it, certainly, I would try to engineer it so that it was to Mr. Claude / Mr. Gippity's taste

1. There is no single "the right way", different app have different "right ways" 2. As for the flat fee, it only works initially when things are simple, as time goes on and your business and usecases you support grows, a flat fee won't work anymore.

I mean I would be limiting it to a very specific use case, and the flat fee would be "plus a percentage of the underlying", something like $50/mo + 20% of the AWS spend underlying.

And for that, with a simplified use case, well, they can scale up to $20k+ a month if they like, that would be ideal, and if they need a more complicated setup or enterpriseyness, migrate off with my blessing and available-not-required hands on support (again for a reasonable fee, maybe $10k if you want the white glove).

Not to be callous but even the 3-2-1 rule is pretty basic, the issue is that people don't apply it. But that's a hiring and strategy thing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com