Comment on Tucson City Council votes 7-0, unanimously to kill AI Data Center
DeceasedPassenger@lemmy.world 3 weeks agoI haven’t given a god damn dime to amazon since 2020, ever since I learned about the piss bottles. I’ve asked (and assisted) others to do the same. What the fuck else do you expect someone to do? Speak for yourself asshole.
jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 3 weeks ago
Are you familiar with AWS? Amazon Web services. Many, many, websites use them and I don’t think there’s a way to tell as a user.
Like, you go to a website and their images are hosted on s3 (an aws service) and their database is on RDS (also AWS), and their whole backend application is using eks or ecs or whatever.
That’s extremely common. Companies don’t run their own hardware anymore very often.
sobchak@programming.dev 3 weeks ago
I never understood the popularity of AWS. It’s much cheaper using VPSs and even dedicated servers sometimes. I’ve worked on very cost-sensitive projects where I rolled our own highly-available k8s and postgres clusters on dedicated servers and VPSs and saved the company a shit load of money. Only used the “cloud” to store backups (Backblaze). There’s tons of other options other than major “cloud” providers, and they’re often much cheaper.
DeceasedPassenger@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I know. I’m not a web dev nor do I know anyone who is to convince otherwise, to use other services. AWS dominance is undeniably huge. If you know a way to combat that (alternative infrastructure) I would be happy to hear it, and I will share that alongside what I already tell people. Again I’m not well-versed in that space, but my understanding is that AWS is essentially the only full-stack solution that’s also highly scalable. Open to correction if I’m wrong here.
jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 3 weeks ago
Google and Microsoft have competing services, but those companies also suck. I think they’re less popular, but I don’t know much about why.
I’m not aware of any smaller competitors, though some probably exist. It would be a big risk for a company to go with a new provider. There’s a lot of library support for the big players, for one thing. If you want your python application to talk to AWS, the boto library is just right there.
You could run your own hardware somewhere, but that has its own host of problems, if you’ll pardon the pun. I worked somewhere a long time ago that had its own servers in a data center. The place got flooded in a big storm and we were down for a couple days.
DeceasedPassenger@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Agreed, MS and Google are pretty much on the same plane with regards to company ethics.
Makes sense that it becomes a serious trade-off with usability the more a company tries to DIY. The risk aspect is certainly hard to get around. Seems that a solution to this problem would have to be long-term. Any company that has competed with AWS in the past, afaik, has been purchased and absorbed. It would likely require the creation of a nonprofit with a guiding directive to prioritize keeping the organization independent and never being sold. But I’ve seen that sort of thing fall apart and go off-mission in other industries too.
Considering the above, the only other thing I can think of is a regulating body declaring AWS as a monopoly and forcing them to split. The chances of that happening in the current administration are probably near zero.
Shit sucks, though I appreciate your response.