Comment on Europe is looking for alternatives to US cloud providers
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 week agoI would hope to see cloud service providers fall more under a utility type of regulation
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:
- hardware generation - very few people only care about compute capacity, they care about architecture (ARM, x86, RISC-V, etc), CPU capabilities (SSE, cryptography support, etc), latency between nodes, etc
- abstractions/add-on features - S3, storage blocks, k8s, lambdas, DDOS protection, etc
- policies - allowed services, bandwidth limits, etc
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.
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
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.
Even their sales people are pretty well incentivize to drive service consumption rather than promote lock in
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.
spark947@lemm.ee 1 week ago
I think you are dicounting how simple most cloud applications are - compute cores, bucket storage and virtual Networks make up the vast majority, with block storage and serverless compute probably making up a second to everything else being a distant third. I agree that there is specialization involved, but I also believe that regulation could go a long way to ensuring better access and making it possible for more competition. Right now, only a few companies have a monopoly on the datacenter infrastructure itself.
This is actually a lot more similar to power Utilities, which hides a vast and complex system of demand based generation that is hidden by ISOs. A regulatory system could work really well, and deliver much more and better service at lower prices. Otherwise we will see Cloud providers raising prices and offering deals more towards the large enterprises that can build billing support, which was the original complaint.
Not that I think we are close to that. Legislation around technology is woefully bad and behind in the US at least.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
The thing is, people often switch providers due to poor network speeds, overprovisioned resources, and outdated hardware. Budget hosts use older hardware and whatnot to keep prices down, and premium hosts use newer hardware to justify a higher price.
If regulations come in that cap certain costs, it’ll likely devolve into a race to the bottom per unit, with larger companies generally winning because they can get better deals on hardware due to hulk pricing. I imagine it could kill segmentation as well.
Maybe it would be okay. I’m just not very confident in my government to craft sensible policy that doesn’t just benefit the largest lobbies, as in, the largest providers.
spark947@lemm.ee 1 day ago
You are describing a scenario similar to the Texas power grid where that has indeed happened and then prices go up anyway as services are knocked out from a lack of investment in infrastructure. Similar stuff happens today when a vulnerability in S3 emerges or something like that. It is still a race to the bottom, and we have absolutely seen stagnation in service offerings.
The Independent System Operator (ISO) system works extremely well to field multiple producers and negotiate for the best rates among competition. It’s one of the reasons why we all take electricity for granted, unless you live in Texas or on a less serious scale Arizona where two corprorate entities are grandfathered in to manage the supply, they enjoy a duopoly and the rates for the service is not very competitive.