People looked at me like they saw water burning but that would have made the dependency on the US a lot easier to sever. Just move the VM's.
To me it's like anything else in engineering, are the costs, risks, and benefits fully understood, and worth the tradeoff in the particular context.
I worked for a startup doing internet of things, the consumer would buy a device and get lifetime service baked in. And that company was a step further, just renting space in a colo was incredibly cost efficient, which supported the sales model and competitive landscape of that product. But it was also very costly to attention, one of the most valuable resources. But it can also get costly in non-intuitive ways, an example that comes to mind is we started to get interviews where a generation of candidates no longer had experience with metal, it was a foreign world to them.
With more experience, I find it's really the costs that get severely underestimated, both for and against the suggestion.
At some point, you have people (on here and elsewhere) questioning what all these people in an organization do. PART of the answer is that they're doing internal work that could have been outsourced in various ways.
In fact, I had no idea our static website at a scale-up in 2019 was costing us 90€/month; it came up when we were told to cut costs. Developers don’t always have a say in these things.
Heck, I then went and got a series of certifications in GCP. Even then, I’m not sure I’d understand the full complexity and pricing options of GCP. Smaller clouds and simple VPS solutions really are the overlooked option.
Unfortunately this is neither the case for very large, or very small companies.
Very large companies may have some experience, but it is usually legacy. Or buried under processes and politics.
Small companies will not have the experience to make the analysis
The machine is a beast and I can serve a lot of users with it. In fact, and quite funnily, I already serve much more users with it than a lot of my older clients do with their software running on expensive k8s setup because „scale“ :-)
And last, but not least, I had a lot of fun building it. Its just nice to hear that thing humming away in the corner.
Honestly even if you have a single server, running k8s (or maybe Docker Compose for really simple cases) on it is still the simplest way to manage it (assuming you have more than 1 service, anyway). One configuration file format, one CLI tool, zero special paths to memorize, no filesystem permissions to configure, pretty good security out of the box, access to a whole bunch of helm charts and operators (for example, cert-manager, external-dns, prometheus, alert-manager, some logging operator for centralized logging with a decent UI and search, and a postgres operator for backups / replication / failover), etc.
We can go with your idea, sure: a few months in, an Account Manager from the cloud provider shows up and says your bill could be reduced by 50% if you just adopt some changes, using their custom, super optimized tools (“minor changes” will be the mantra).
And now you have your own company looking back to you on how can they get those savings, people who don’t understand what a VM is and cannot differentiate salesforce from an elastic container, as everything is “cloud”, but heard “50% off”.
Further, it needs people in decision making roles who understand and value the strategic differences between having an infrastructure concept that is trapped in one provider's proprietary software tooling ecosystem (aws, azure, etc), vs things built on open standards that are portable.
If a car salesman told me I could save 50% of my fuel bill from driving their special car a certain way I'd laugh at them.
2016 - lets use EC2, its just VM, we can move off
2018 - I see you are hosting your own PostgreSQL in EC2, you can use our managed solution
2020 - you are already using 18 our services (note, at this point you might still be using non-vendor products, like VMs, managed DB, and so on), why not use our IAM instead of rolling out your own auth.
2024 - you are now deeply locked, lets add more lock-in, why don't you use this tool to optimize your costs (welcome DynamoDB)
At this point, no one would ever question next tool from salesman. Because engineers see that company doesnt have strategy to move to another cloud, why should they reject this new tool?
also consider the people who are involved, a lot of times after 2 years you have totally new people in your team, they won't have context and constraints you had in the past when deciding to buy "just VM", they see it as "we already use AWS"
I would do a calculation based on their public price plan and come up with a 5-10x price compared to the bare metal OVH solution that perfectly fit our use case. I would then ask the sales team where I made a mistake in my calculation and hear nothing back.
A few months later, they would come back with the same pitch and the whole process would repeat...
People who know the tech, no
Non-technical middle management types, yes. It produces revenue when done aggressively enough, google "solarwinds sales people" for many anecdotal examples of extreme persistence. Not that I agree with it.
The cloud makes it simple. They offer you managed service X. They hire experts for service x and you pay a part of the cost on top of your infra cost. No searching. No vetting. You just use the service.
I see the why this might be attractive. It isn't to me. But the pencil pushers like it.
Your engineers who all have to possess AWS or similar certs before you hire them, work for free?
A move off VPS to managed services doesn't reduce your headcount or labour costs.
I think there is a very narrow space where you need the resources that this provides and it's not yet more cost effective to have your own team of admins. At a certain headcount a the number admins don't matter that much anymore.
If you're using managed services that are so complex you need certified people then you're doing it wrong
Another advantage of AWS is permission management, automatic RDS snapshots, cloudwatch comes out of the box...
You can do everything with VMs, but in practise it's probably much harder.
I don’t blame people for being skeptical
Beyond that, I just don't understand your point of view at all. Do people unironically think there is some super special dark magic being done in the bowels of Amazon, as opposed to just...code that runs on (virtual and physical) machines? The open source community yielded Linux but it's just sooo impossible for it to yield an object storage service? What a strangely shackled view of the world.
I don't blame people for being skeptical
Well... yes?
What do you think the AWS S3 and DDB is running on? Fairy dust?
I can appreciate the desire to close gaps on expertise deficiency and make a vendor responsible, but the whole schtick of 'outsource everything and focus on your business for advantage' always rang to me as just an excuse to give our money to vendors.
Its almost as if the whole case for vertical integration is just taken as a wash
The original promise of the cloud is "you pay us less than you pay your sysadmins", which is not entirely unreasonable, especially at early stages.
Of course running on bare metal from Europe's own Hetzner is even more cost-efficient, if you already have a lot of sysadmin chops.
Unlike most VPSes
Yes, when you pay you have to print a receipt with QR code, and then have to scan it to log out.
> Last year, the Dutch Central Bank (DNB) and the Netherlands Authority for the Financial Markets (AFM) warned that the Dutch financial sector had become too dependent on foreign IT service providers
I wonder how much if this is a personal choice, and how much is pressure from the government. Banks are famously the first target of politicians, and it's common in China for exec's to publicly choose a national option under pressure from the CPP.
At the very least a country dependent cloud services from multiple other countries is less dependent on any one of them than a country predominantly dependent on one (and most of Europe is currently dependent on US cloud providers).
VW bought Porsche
However it was more complicated than that. Porche owned 50+% of Volkswagen at the time of Volkswagen buying them. Porche got over extended and leveraged buying Volkswagen . The management family is closely connected since the start and at the time in early 2010s 20% government ownership rule was just getting stuck down by European courts .
https://www.scaleway.com/en/news/scaleway-accelerates-its-eu...
It’s very much not a discount cloud provider. They are costly unlike their physical discount grocery stores.
Ok so nothing has actually happened. These migrations are difficult and expensive, and often fail. It will be interesting to see an update in 5 years on how this went.
All of the discussed alternatives (stackit, scaleway, aldi) are owned by European billionnaires.
Stackit is owned by Dieter Schwarz (who inherited everything he has ever owned)
Aldi cloud is owned by Beate Heister and Karl Albrecht (both children of the real founders, Karl and Theo Albrecht. Together they are probably the richest Germans)
Scaleway is owned by Xavier Niel (free.fr, who was born high middle class and at least can be said to have built out his empire)
The only owner here that is even remotely interested in the business is Xavier Niel. To add insult to injury, all 3 are known for being extremely cheap when it comes to wages (Xavier Niel less so than the others, but it's not great)
[0] https://commission.europa.eu/news-and-media/news/commission-...
I used to have quite a few customer hosted at Rackspace in the early 2010’s and I always thought it sad they dropped the ball when they got bought out by private investment and they fired most of the talent. I loved their API and the docs were really good.
Companies should have native capability to work computers, especially those whose business is pure information, like banks.
(Tesco cloud compute will price-match the lidl cloud-compute, but only if you remember to scan your Tesco clubcard at the self-checkout while buying it.)
Ok so nothing has actually happened. It's also not specified whether this is in addition to their AWS footprint, or if it's a migration. It will be interesting to see an update in 5 years on how this goes.
Site-to-Site VPN between STACKIT and Azure using a LibreSwan VM and an Azure VPN Gateway
FortiGate HA cluster in STACKIT - not a single ICMP packet got lost during failover
