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Ofcom proposes to refer UK cloud market for investigation

ofcom.org.uk

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Re: Ofcom proposes to refer UK cloud market for investigation

#11

Post by YawningAngel »

hkt wrote: post #10
YawningAngel wrote: post #7

> Technical restrictions on interoperability. These are imposed by the leading firms that prevent some of their services working effectively with services from other providers. This means customers need to put additional effort into reconfiguring their data and applications to work across different clouds. I'm not sure what they mean by this, anyone care to speculate?

I'd guess that migrating from any of the local cloud DB variations (Aurora say) is unduly hard once you've migrated to it. But that's just a guess. It is certainly a PITA to migrate, I know that for sure.

I agree with that, but given that a lot of the DBs on AWS and Azure are proprietary software (eg Cosmos and DDB) I'm not sure what ofcom proposes doing about that.

Re: Ofcom proposes to refer UK cloud market for investigation

#12

Post by qeternity »

cntainer wrote: post #8

Just another example that a free market does not always ensure healthy competition and some times intervention is needed to level the playing field.

I say this as someone who only uses AWS for DR backups: hosting infra is one of the most competitive industries out there. Major cloud costs are exorbitant but that should be interpreted as proof of a great product. I shudder at paying 9c/gb egress but apparently many others do not.

Re: Ofcom proposes to refer UK cloud market for investigation

#13

Post by cntainer »

hkt wrote: post #10
YawningAngel wrote: post #7

> Technical restrictions on interoperability. These are imposed by the leading firms that prevent some of their services working effectively with services from other providers. This means customers need to put additional effort into reconfiguring their data and applications to work across different clouds. I'm not sure what they mean by this, anyone care to speculate?

I'd guess that migrating from any of the local cloud DB variations (Aurora say) is unduly hard once you've migrated to it. But that's just a guess. It is certainly a PITA to migrate, I know that for sure.

Cloud providers will always make their in-house offerings more attractive and easier to use compared to other (open standards) solutions. That's how you get locked in.

Re: Ofcom proposes to refer UK cloud market for investigation

#14

Post by madaxe_again »

cntainer wrote: post #8

Just another example that a free market does not always ensure healthy competition and some times intervention is needed to level the playing field.

A free market always results in monopoly - it is the nature of capital to accrue and concentrate.

This is the old unpopular Hayek/Friedman “classic liberal” position, that markets and industry should be heavily regulated and taxed.

Re: Ofcom proposes to refer UK cloud market for investigation

#15

Post by vidarh »

qeternity wrote: post #12
cntainer wrote: post #8

Just another example that a free market does not always ensure healthy competition and some times intervention is needed to level the playing field.

I say this as someone who only uses AWS for DR backups: hosting infra is one of the most competitive industries out there. Major cloud costs are exorbitant but that should be interpreted as proof of a great product. I shudder at paying 9c/gb egress but apparently many others do not.

Same. I use Hetzner and DigitalOcean for my own stuff, and shudder at AWS costs. At the same time both my current and previous employers use AWS and it's fine for their user because revenue is (very) high relative to the cloud resource usage, and that is a situation where cloud usage is fine. But so many - B2C in particular - businesses who uses cloud have tight enough margins that they're just setting themselves up for being disrupted by a competitor with tighter cost control.

Re: Ofcom proposes to refer UK cloud market for investigation

#16

Post by Moissanite »

AWS and Azure should both be separated from their parent companies. That would end a lot of the hand-wringing about Amazon competing with its retail customers, and would force Microsoft to stop it's anticompetitive license bundling shenanigans.

GCP can follow in a few years, if they survive that long.

Re: Ofcom proposes to refer UK cloud market for investigation

#17

Post by zamnos »

Moissanite wrote: post #16

AWS and Azure should both be separated from their parent companies. That would end a lot of the hand-wringing about Amazon competing with its retail customers, and would force Microsoft to stop it's anticompetitive license bundling shenanigans. GCP can follow in a few years, if they survive that long.

It's unclear if the accounting Microsoft is using to account for Azure is actually valid. Apparently a lot of Office revenue is being stuffed under the Azure division to inflate its numbers to make them look bigger than Google.

Re: Ofcom proposes to refer UK cloud market for investigation

#18

Post by cntainer »

qeternity wrote: post #12
cntainer wrote: post #8

Just another example that a free market does not always ensure healthy competition and some times intervention is needed to level the playing field.

I say this as someone who only uses AWS for DR backups: hosting infra is one of the most competitive industries out there. Major cloud costs are exorbitant but that should be interpreted as proof of a great product. I shudder at paying 9c/gb egress but apparently many others do not.

The magic of cloud is how quickly you can scale things up. If you're a new fast growing business it will give you a competitive edge.

If you drank to cloud kool-aid from the beginning you kind of get used to huge costs for simple services so it's easier for your brain to justify paying 10k a month for a simple web app deployed in kubernetes, using cosmos db and any other number of services.

I've seen many companies that started on the cloud and their core architecture is so interleaved with the cloud that it would a huge investment to reduce that dependency and switch.

Re: Ofcom proposes to refer UK cloud market for investigation

#19

Post by ClumsyPilot »

qeternity wrote: post #12
cntainer wrote: post #8

Just another example that a free market does not always ensure healthy competition and some times intervention is needed to level the playing field.

I say this as someone who only uses AWS for DR backups: hosting infra is one of the most competitive industries out there. Major cloud costs are exorbitant but that should be interpreted as proof of a great product. I shudder at paying 9c/gb egress but apparently many others do not.

> hosting infra is one of the most competitive industries out there.

Here is an experiment - tell your employer you will be hosting on (insert no-name provider here), to same a literal million dollars, and see if you can get security team to sign off on it.

Here is another experiment - reach out to he security team, and tell them AWS costs are too high, ask them which providers they will be ready and willing to sign off. My guess is it will not be a big list beyond AWS/Azure/GCP.

So the market is not competitive at all, most of us cannot switch providers even if the alternative would be 100x better.

PS: I am not saying security team are assholes, I am pointing out a major barrier to competition.

Re: Ofcom proposes to refer UK cloud market for investigation

#20

Post by hkt »

qeternity wrote: post #12
cntainer wrote: post #8

Just another example that a free market does not always ensure healthy competition and some times intervention is needed to level the playing field.

I say this as someone who only uses AWS for DR backups: hosting infra is one of the most competitive industries out there. Major cloud costs are exorbitant but that should be interpreted as proof of a great product. I shudder at paying 9c/gb egress but apparently many others do not.

The summary of findings confirms that IaaS is competitive, PaaS less so, SaaS even less than that.
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