Comment on Europe is looking for alternatives to US cloud providers
spark947@lemm.ee 3 days agoYes, 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 3 days 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 10 hours 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.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 5 hours ago
I’m just concerned about how this all plays out.
With internet, I totally agree a since it’s an incredibly simple operation, relatively speaking. At the end of the day, it’s bandwidth, latency, stability, and maybe a few features on top, which makes it really simple to standardize, just like with electricity or water.
However, cloud hosting has a lot of moving parts:
There are a ton of reasons to choose one provider over another.
If we instead treat it as a utility, we’ll remove a lot of the differentiation and companies will instead compete purely on margins, as in, who can offer the cheapest, crappiest product that technically meets the requirements. When you can no longer compete on features, you compete on service and margins.
I’m not happy with how dominant AWS is, but that’s what first mover advantage does. Yes, they weren’t the first to create cloud services, but they were the first to create a one-stop shop of services companies want. That opens up opportunities for lock-in, but it also preserves competition for smaller companies to take the market segments that don’t need all those features.
And that’s their core competency: vertical integration. A lot of businesses prefer to be screwed by one vendor instead of several.
I get it.
That said, I think cloud services are starting to settle down. S3 style storage has largely won the war, and now everyone and their dog has an S3-compatible storage engine, which keeps AWS a bit more honest on its pricing. The same will happen with other AWS features, meaning their first mover advantage will be less impactful going forward as competitors catch up.
That’s what lock-in is, it’s just a softer form than things like egress costs. They want you to use AWS services everywhere, which makes switching to a competitor more difficult. AWS’ model is more palatable than others’, but it’s still a form of lock-in.