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AWS just went multi-cloud

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Re: AWS just went multi-cloud

#121

Post by julianozen »

MikeTheGreat wrote: post #89
julianozen wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I enjoyed my team and the work hours were reasonable. AWS wasn't the type of product work I wanted to keep pursing, but I learned a lot in my time there. Amazon team's culture vary widely depending on the teams budget, management style and deadlines. Overall I enjoyed my time at Amazon

Several posts here mention the importance of budget/funding for creating a good team to work in (which is 100% reasonable - that's true everywhere). I'm curious about how individual teams within Amazon have funding problems. Amazon overall seems to have plenty of money and they seem like the sort of place that wouldn't have a problem dissolving a team that isn't meeting their goals (I'm assuming they'd dissolve the t…

From my time at Amazon, I wasn't really a part of these decisions so the following is just my anecdotal perception those businesses and how often teams had things like lunches, team events and hired staff

In general, if the underlying business is profitable or if the product is experimental Amazon will allocate a larger budget to the team

  - Retail has narrow profits and is fairly well established -> Lower budgets
  - AWS is very profitable -> High budget
  - Alexa (while I was there) was growing very fast and was trying crazy initiatives -> High budget
Contrast this to my impression of Google, where it seems like every team has roughly the same perks but only a few make money

Re: AWS just went multi-cloud

#123

Post by renewiltord »

Nullabillity wrote: post #112
dv_dt wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would note that F500 companies are going to have the resources to move out of lock in if it came down to it, and AWS sales management knows it and would have to negotiate costs with that in mind. Smaller scale companies than the F500 that don't have that kind of leverage have to concern themselves more w/ lock-in.

"Oops, your outgoing bandwidth is now 1000x more expensive"

I wouldn't worry about it. This doesn't happen. More likely to fail trying to be independent of all vendors than to be locked into a vendor.

It's only half a million dollars to egress 10 PB from S3. You'll be fine.

Re: AWS just went multi-cloud

#124

Post by cheesgrateron »

addicted wrote: post #114
cheesgrateron wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any of the companies I've worked with (and I've worked with many) are large enough and have been around long enough to understand that re-architecting apps, doing lift-and-shifts, re-training employees, or anything like that is an inevitable cost of doing business that is going to happen every couple of years no matter what, so any time fretting about "lock in" would ultimately be a waste of time. And perhaps more im…

> companies I've worked with (and I've worked with many) are large enough and have been around long enough to understand that re-architecting apps...is going to happen every couple of years no matter what Like the commentator you responded to said. There are many fools in business.

On the contrary, I'd say if you're not re-architecting your apps every couple of years then you're at risk of falling behind.

I'm not talking about rebuilding everything from scratch, but making an active effort to do self introspection and ask yourself "we built this app 3 years ago with certain requirements in mind and chose stack X to host it, but a lot has changed in the past 3 years, both in our requirements and in the technology landscape. Should we still be using stack X or does something else fit our needs better?" is unequivocally a good practice.

Re: AWS just went multi-cloud

#125

Post by cheesgrateron »

Nullabillity wrote: post #113
beachy wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything in life is about risk vs reward. Platform lock in is a risk. The reward is faster time to market, thus making more money earlier, thus having more means to ameliorate your risks.

Imagined faster time to market. In reality, you just end up spending more time trying to debug black boxes.

I think you must have a limited mindset of how long it can take wheels to turn in large companies. Without cloud, it's not uncommon for the F500s I've worked at to take literal months (90+ days) just to provision and stand up a new server for an application team to even begin developing on. Even if you spend time "debugging black boxes" (which is highly debatable), most of the time you're still moving a lot faster with cloud than before.

Some companies are better than others. One place I worked had a decent OpenStack implementation in their own data centers, and it greased the wheels a little bit (though it was not without its own issues). And of course smaller companies are likely more agile and able to move faster. But for the most part, these big companies see some very real benefits in speed by embracing public clouds.

Re: AWS just went multi-cloud

#126

Post by briffle »

dboreham wrote: post #63
cheesgrateron wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked as a consultant in this area for years with large F500 companies and not once have I heard anyone actually be concerned with the "lock in" boogeyman. There used to be a lot of concern around general trust of the cloud, which drove people to stick to on-prem servers. But "lock in", IME, is only something people fret about on HN. What I think is happening is that companies are starting to gain more experien…

Anyone who is not concerned about lock in is a fool. There are many fools in business.

That must be why nobody buys Oralce, or SAP, or mainframes.

Re: AWS just went multi-cloud

#127

Post by csharptwdec19 »

briffle wrote: post #126
dboreham wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone who is not concerned about lock in is a fool. There are many fools in business.

That must be why nobody buys Oralce, or SAP, or mainframes.

I've not been at a place while they got sold on Oracle, but I've been at one that was desperately working to get away from it. Over 15 years the relationship went from amicable to "Oracle reps are in town this week, give management a wide berth" announcements.

Re: AWS just went multi-cloud

#128

Post by erikerikson »

julianozen wrote: post #7

I wonder if Amazon’s theory here is that by offering multi-cloud support they can put decision makers at ease when choosing cloud vendors by making them feel like they’re not getting locked into AWS - but Amazon also expects most customers to mostly only use AWS out of convenience Disclaimer - I used to work for AWS

My experience in the three majors approximates market share.

There are a lot of differences but AWS is just better (obvs opinion). When organizations are less locked in they have flexibility to choose according to evolving preference and this makes multi-cloud a systemic customer acquisition strategy. Consider multi-cloud an on ramp and I think you look at the basis for the strategy.

Consider further that fuzzier cloud boundaries re-enable the innovation pipelines that start ups deliver to the incumbents but that were being complicated by cloud boundaries.

Re: AWS just went multi-cloud

#129

Post by danielrhodes »

cheesgrateron wrote: post #47
julianozen wrote: post #7

I wonder if Amazon’s theory here is that by offering multi-cloud support they can put decision makers at ease when choosing cloud vendors by making them feel like they’re not getting locked into AWS - but Amazon also expects most customers to mostly only use AWS out of convenience Disclaimer - I used to work for AWS

I've worked as a consultant in this area for years with large F500 companies and not once have I heard anyone actually be concerned with the "lock in" boogeyman. There used to be a lot of concern around general trust of the cloud, which drove people to stick to on-prem servers. But "lock in", IME, is only something people fret about on HN. What I think is happening is that companies are starting to gain more experien…

It's not about lock in or getting access to the side-show features available in other clouds. For a large company there is significant business risk in having all your infrastructure in one place. A billing error or some other misunderstanding could have catastrophic consequences. I've heard of absurdly close calls here. I know that one public company dependent on AWS maintains multiple accounts to lower the risk of this happening. Multi-cloud is another way to mitigate that risk.

Re: AWS just went multi-cloud

#130

Post by yelling_cat »

redkoala wrote: post #69
cheesgrateron wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked as a consultant in this area for years with large F500 companies and not once have I heard anyone actually be concerned with the "lock in" boogeyman. There used to be a lot of concern around general trust of the cloud, which drove people to stick to on-prem servers. But "lock in", IME, is only something people fret about on HN. What I think is happening is that companies are starting to gain more experien…

It depends on the industry. A lot of retail companies are moving away from Amazon to avoid having competitive data flow through AWS infrastructure. Some companies may have different business units across different cloud providers but push for strategic consolidation on a major cloud provider for new implementations. The heavier the use of cloud native solutions and managed services, the greater the effort to migrate…

Retail companies like Walmart are driving more movement than you'd expect since they aren't only moving their own compute from AWS, they're requiring their own tech partners and vendors to provide them non-AWS-based alternatives as well. I've been on several migration/training projects for companies with large retail customers since they hadn't had time to build the sort of GCP or Azure expertise yet that they had around AWS.
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