AWS just went multi-cloud (opens in new tab)

I've worked as a consultant in this area for years with large F500 companies and not once have I heard anyone actually be concerned with the "lock in" boogeyman. There used to be a lot of concern around general trust of the cloud, which drove people to stick to on-prem servers. But "lock in", IME, is only something people fret about on HN.

What I think is happening is that companies are starting to gain more experience in the cloud and are less intimidated by it. In the past, using just one cloud was scary enough, let alone trying to use 2+ at the same time. But now, with more experience under their belt, companies are realizing that each cloud has its own advantages and disadvantages. AWS is rock solid when it comes to EC2, S3, RDS, Lambda, and some others. But if you have some teams in your company that want to use a PaaS, GCP App Engine is preferable to AWS Elastic Beanstalk. Similarly, your data science or AI/ML teams might prefer to use GCP services over AWS. Or maybe your risk management team is going the full stretch for disaster recovery and says not only do you have to be multi-region within one cloud, but you are required to be multi-cloud as well.

With companies moving this way, I think this is AWS realizing that multi-cloud is inevitable, so they might as well support it, if not embrace it.

Is working at AWS hellish? Or once you get in it's just a normal job?

I get its heavily dependent on the team, just wondering from your perspective.

See Jeff Bezos' famous comment: "It is better to cannibalize yourself; than let others cannibalize you"

This should answer your question and hint what's to come.

This the AWS extension of the Marketplace part of Amazon retail. Thanks to this, they will know how companies are running their systems on other clouds, the same way the know what independent vendors are selling and how well.

This is going to be very interesting on the long run.

With anthos and arc, the iaas market is going to be commodity with near zero margin. The writing is on the wall that services will be the more profitable market in the long run. AWS recognizes this and the multi cloud push is the way to maximize on that.

This looks like Amazon FUD. The revenue from alternate clouds will be tiny compared to running in AWS, so there's not much motivation internally to follow through. Also, to make money on other clouds you have to go deep on the products and offer value adds on top. That's not the Amazon model and anyway would be difficult to implement outside of a small number of products. Ergo, this is not something they are really going to do in a meaningful way.

MS SQL Server is a historical analogy. Microsoft could have run the table in the database market by porting to Linux but took years to overcome internal inertia required to run outside Windows.

My experience in the three majors approximates market share.

There are a lot of differences but AWS is just better (obvs opinion). When organizations are less locked in they have flexibility to choose according to evolving preference and this makes multi-cloud a systemic customer acquisition strategy. Consider multi-cloud an on ramp and I think you look at the basis for the strategy.

Consider further that fuzzier cloud boundaries re-enable the innovation pipelines that start ups deliver to the incumbents but that were being complicated by cloud boundaries.

That's a possibility. Another one would be more out of regulatory requirement within financial services. By default, most top tier banks would need multi-cloud to even begin thinking about a cloud journey so this offering just puts AWS in the right space with their competitors. It's possible that most of the operational workloads will run on AWS with other cloud vendors being in place as backup/secondary workloads. Might also be some good discounts given by AWS to secure the deal.

with the ever expanding number of services/industries Amazon is operating at(or planning to get into) , the vendor lock in is becoming the real deal. Ex walmart wont go to aws, just because and it probably never will!

So the loss of AWS is gain for Azure(w.r.t Walmart) and frankly apart from the 365 offerings people are taking azure seriously because Azure or Microsoft doesn't compete with other industries on a broader scale!

On the flip side, Netflix uses AWS even though amazon competes it with Prime (not sure for how long), as amazon knocking the doors of new industries such as Big pharma, either they need to move AWS as a separate company or ease them with these kind of multi cloud measures.

Some times new decision makers join the company and they want to use other cloud providers. That's a valid concern that most people should have as they're building out things specific to one vendor.

Bezos wants you controlling everything from AWS, be that your own servers with GreenGrass or GCP/Azure through managed Kubernetes.

ACG employee here so grain of salt, etc - but I paid for an ACG subscription long before I worked there.

My favorite piece of ACG actually isn't even the courses, but "Cloud Playground", which came over in the recent Linux Academy acquisition. [0] One-click AWS, Azure, or GCP sandbox environments. They're live for 4 hours on ACG's credit card and people sometimes assume they're just for doing course labs, but, like, you can use them for whatever. It's an end run around sandbox account procurement in a business context, or a safeguard against leaving an expensive resource running for personal experimentation.

[0] https://help.acloud.guru/hc/en-us/articles/360001477955-Clou...

>I am not interested in any certifications and such

ACG is very focused specifically on helping you pass the certification exams. It can still be helpful even if you don't want a cert because naturally there is some overlap between passing a cert and knowing how to use AWS/GCP/Azure, and one great thing about ACG is access to the AWS playground environments where you can get hands-on experience. However, if your goal is to ignore the cert and really learn the material, you might look elsewhere.

That said, the ACG courses for the basic level AWS certs really don't take more than a couple weekends to go through, and at only $25/mo, it's not a bad investment to just pay for 1 month, get the foundational level knowledge, then move on to other ways of learning.

I used their course as part of training for one of the AWS Certs and found the videos/quizzes pretty informative and useful. Not too long-winded, and an easy enough to use interface.

I only did the one course, but from that, I'd recommend it.

Their content is absolutely average.

ACG as a company nearly killed Jupiter Broadcasting. JB were able to escape but are facing many years financial hardship due to an overly burdensome litigious culture from ACG after the acquisition of Linux Academy from separating the two businesses.

This split came on the heels of a questionable HR policy implementation around the firing of Joe Ressington. Reverse sexism is apparently OK but casual swearing during a work trip to the pub, is not.

From an ethics perspective, avoid ACG. There's a lot more I could say on all this but I won't - it's hackernews not reddit.

Don’t forget their ElasticSearch version. Now that is a shit show.

I can't think of a better description of their EKS launch than "half-assed product introduced with great fanfare when the lack of an alternative to GKE was a disadvantage for customer acquisition." EKS had much improved when I last played with it around a year ago, though.

The post does mention Azure's Arc and Sentinel, but definitely should have called out Anthos specifically.

The interesting part of this to me isn't so much that other solutions already exist -- Azure and GCP, due to their catch-up position, have always been far more conciliatory toward the reality of other cloud workloads than AWS. It's that AWS is signaling, however grudgingly, that they will have to play ball with other clouds in order to stay ahead. That's a big shift.

The difference is (just based on what AWS say about ACG) is that anthos comes into its own when managing multiple clusters. The drawback is that all the most common infrastructure requires you to be all-in on GKE and the google stack. If you want to use Cassandra or Postgres, for example, you either manage it yourself or use the google options. The problem with this is that you basically give up all the benefit of having a multi-cloud approach by following this approach. However! If you have a bunch of legacy systems sitting on an on-prem set of self-hosted hardware finally you can mix and match between the on-prem stuff and the GCP managed cluster.

ACG sounds like it can be used to manage hosts and containers; so it's more like enhanced k8s / EKS than a meta layer above kubernetes. This is just my take on this product based on how the marketing lingo talks about it. I'm much more familiar with AnthOS

The EKS Distro blog post answers some of the questions.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/introducing-amazon-e...

Good questions. I'd guess you'd have to make interface pods for those services if possible maybe?

Then before switching providers write new interface pods?

Sounds easier said than done but I guess that's one option.

Yes is there an optimistic take on this problem? Any indication that something like AWS EKS multi-cloud will sidestep it? Every time I read one of these announcements I just shudder to think about how the costs will scale.

Are most multi-cloud setups just very careful about intra-cloud data transfers?

You mean other companies don’t do things that will ultimately benefit them?

Who does not do that :-)

It's very much new for AWS. Their messaging has always been incredibly exclusionary of other clouds. to the point where they've even prohibited their partners from using words like "multi-cloud, anycloud", etc.