I hope this won’t be counted as some form of self-promotion, even though I am sharing a post from my own blog.
As a tech worker who works in a Cloud shop, I wanted to elaborate the many reasons why I find working with Clouds terrible, from multiple points of view.
I tried to organize my thoughts in a (relatively long) post, in which both technical aspects and political aspects (which are very related) are covered.
I am sure many people will have different perspectives, and this could be potentially also a nice prompt for a discussion.
Anything that requires a fancy buzzword is usually stupid but a good way to make money for someone. The “cloud” has always existed as offsite hosting. Off-site shared servers, VPSs, whatever. It’s no different than running CPanel on an LAMP VPS in 2003.
But calling it “the cloud” gave all the business majors a hard on and then the accounts department realized they could manipulate share pricing by reducing the amount of assets a company holds. It’s the same stupid reason many companies don’t own their corporate headquarters or remote centers. They lease the, even if from themselves through another holding. It looks better on paper so the share price goes up. It’s all mind boggling stupid.
The cloud today significantly different than the 2003 cpanel LAMP server. It’s a whole new landscape. Complex, highly-available architectures that cannot be replicated in an on-prem environment are easily built from code in minutes on AWS.
Those capabilities come with a steep learning curve on how to operate them in a secure and effective manor, but that’s always going to be the case in this industry. The people that can grow and learn will.
I’m fully aware of the few buzzword and marketing pitches that cloud hosting uses. I’m forced to use both GCP and AWS for different contracts and I’m good at it.
The real truth is that most websites and internet services do not need scale. They do not need all this crap. A Pentium 3 could host all the data for most of these businesses and services. You don’t need serverless lambda functions to handle an api when an actual endpoint does the same thing to pull some info. The few companies that need such distributed computing and power, will need a big on-site or off-site implementation. It makes sense for that sometimes. But most times, it doesn’t even then. You’re just outsourcing your engineering and paying a premium.
I have seen so many startups spin up cloud accounts costing thousands of dollars a month when they’re in “private beta stealth”. Literally a $500 laptop could host all of their services just as quickly with no monthly fee. But as long as the VCs are paying, just flush that cash down.
The costs are definitely a huge consideration and need to be optimized. A few years back we ran a POC of Open Shift in AWS that seemed to idle at like $3k/mo with barely anything running at all. That was a bad experiment. I could compare that to our new VMWare bill, which more than doubled this year following the Broadcom acquisition.
The products in AWS simplify costs into an opex model unlike anything that exists on prem and eliminate costly and time consuming hardware replacements. We just put in new load balancers recently because our previous ones were going EoL. They were a special model that ran us a about a half-mil for a few HA pairs including the pro services for installation assistance. How long will it take us to hit that amount using ALBs in AWS? What is the cost of the months that it took us to select the hardware, order, wait 90 days for delivery, rack-power-connect, configure with pro services, load hundreds of certs, gather testers, and run cutover meetings? What about the time spent patching for vulnerabilities? In 5-7 years it’ll be the same thing all over again.
Now think about having to do all of the above for routers, switches, firewalls, VM infra, storage, HVAC, carrier circuits, power, fire suppression.