Comment on Europe is looking for alternatives to US cloud providers
spark947@lemm.ee 1 week agoYes, that is why I said enterprise scale. Pricing for personal stuff is pretty terrible, although it is reasonable in some ways.
I find AWS prices to be very reasonable, but it is much different than going race to the bottom deal hunting on hetzner. That’s definitely where you want to go deal hunting, but it isn’t suitable for a lot of enterprise applications.
With the bigger CSPs, you really have to take care of the billing yourself to get the best value. Last year, my team was able to cut our client’s cloud bill by 85% while improving service. Kind of unfair - AWS will happily take your money to do stuff incorrectly. They have business units at AWS around customer success that aims to help cut costs, but I can kind of tell they aren’t a priority at the company compared to account execs. Pretty normal for this business, unfortunately.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
We use AWS at work, and the “cutting costs” thing seems largely a way to further lock-in customers. They want you to build around their tools so the switching cost is high enough to not be worthwhile. Then again, I don’t work directly with billing (I’m a SWE, not in OPs), but what I’ve seen looks a lot higher than I would’ve guessed.
Idk, maybe it’s reasonable at scale, but it seems to get really expensive really fast.
spark947@lemm.ee 1 week ago
Yes, vendor lock in is always a concern around AWS. I am of 2 minds about this - the real trade off with on demand resources is cost as AWS has to essentially have hot instances ready for customers, which cost them more to run. So it definitely makes sense to have these billing options that help them save operational overhead and then pass the savings on to their customers.
But it is a fine line. What should be AWS responsibility and what should be the customers? Amazon’s whole deal is trying to step over it it ways that will ultimately be monopolistic. Personally, I am much more concerned with the egress costs, which is their true and much sneakier vendor lock in trap.
To me, the only answer is government regulation. We should treat cloud resources as a utility and regulate it as such to make sure that the large players don’t abuse their monopoly on compute power and servers. Instead, the government’s answer has been to do away with net neutrality, which really only makes them more powerful because they still have a monopoly on the physical resources. This is one of the reasons why I have become self hosted for my own personal technology - but for work there are a lot of benefits to just shutting up and working with a monopoly that at least has to try to drive down costs at some level to prevent regulatory action.
These services only make sense at scale and with large projects that need a ton of planning everyday. AWS will take the little people’s money if they are willing to give it, but they aren’t truly interested in their business.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
Absolutely. That’s basically Oracle’a db strategy.
Things like this are why I’ll never use AWS, even if I get to a scale where it makes sense. I value the ability to switch to a different provider or self-host with my own hardware.
Ideally the market is competitive enough that regulation isn’t needed. But maybe that ship has sailed.
I agree with regulations like Net Neutrality, so I guess it would depend on how it’s worded. I’m just worried massive players like AWS would find ways to abuse any regulations we try to make to exclude others.
But yeah, I don’t pitch switching at work, because I’m not in charge of infra or really involved with it at all. I’m a SWE, not a devOPs or IT tech, so if I’m touching anything in Cloudwatch other than looking at logs, something has gone horribly wrong.
spark947@lemm.ee 5 days ago
The government can get a lot tougher on companies than they currently are in the US. There is a large and somewhat unstoppable public distrust of corporations that will swing the pendulum away from distrust of the government. Whatever part of the federal government that people didn’t trust is having their image re-rehabilitated by DOGE’s idioacy anyway. Corporations will do sneaky lobbying and everything, but at the end of the day they will follow laws that are enforced properly. They don’t have miliataries or private police forces. At least not yet.
I would hope to see cloud service providers fall more under a utility type of regulation, and have the government set up regional ISOs that can buy and distribute services to everyone at regulated prices, and adhere to certain computing standards. This is why I don’t get too mad at billing deals and schemes - if computation, storage, and virtual network infrastructure can be standardized and treated as a utility it would be great for everyone! They deserve to get paid for the power they have to consume and the maintenance and operations cost of a datacenter.
Instead, we see these companies play a very tricky game using the egress costs to capture traffic and activity within their infrastructure. The same strategy applies at Google with ads dictating browser development, at Amazon’s winners and losers based retail business, and everyone’s race to the bottom stealing data for hungry AI model training. It doesn’t work Jim. We need to establish fair legislation for democratizing access to computing and storage at a large scale, the same way we already did with internet access. Instead, we are seeing it go the wrong way with the corporate war against net neutrality from service providers, which is bad for cloud services anyway. In my area, cox was doing some bad stuff, which finally prompted google to come in and deliver fiber they had been teasing for around a decade, which drove costs way down for internet. So hopefully all this stuff will work itself out, but we really need to focus on empowering everyone with access to computation and ownership of their data.
For work, I am lucky enough to work for an employer that has enough pull with AWS that they essentially have to listen to us. But I prefer their open market and transparent, if complicated, pricing to trying to work though a deal with a dozen different other software platform vendors all trying to close business and screw over our clients. Even their sales people are pretty well incentivize to drive service consumption rather than promote lock in. This is leading to a huge problem in AI, but once again I respect the approach AWS is taking with hugging face and making it about flexible consumption than what microsoft and google are doing, trying to shove AI down your throat.