Ofcom proposes to refer UK cloud market for investigation • Hacker News Board

Re: Ofcom proposes to refer UK cloud market for investigation

#21

Post by WastingMyTime89 » Wed, Apr 05, 2023, 7:52 AM UTC

YawningAngel wrote: post #11

hkt wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They don’t propose to do anything. They don’t even say that this feature in particular is illegal.

They merely say that after doing a market study, they noticed that: egress fees are significant, technical barriers to interoperability are in place and the discount structure based on committed spending is suspicious. From their point of view, that warrants an actual full investigation by the Competition and Markets Authority.

Re: Ofcom proposes to refer UK cloud market for investigation

#22

Post by dustedcodes » Wed, Apr 05, 2023, 7:53 AM UTC

ibnbutlAn wrote: post #2

I wonder if the UK situation is worse/better than the rest of Europe here. At least there are Hertzner and OVH, but not sure if they are remotely comparable to AWS et al.

Hetzner is at best comparable to the very first version of AWS, but since then the "traditional" cloud has moved on. Hetzner is basically old school (I guess we can call this model old school now?) IaaS, whereas AWS, Azure and GCP are mostly PaaS now. At Hetzner you think about what infrastructure you need, at traditional cloud providers people don't think about infrastructure that much anymore and rather think about what ready made products they need.

Re: Ofcom proposes to refer UK cloud market for investigation

#23

Post by hkt » Wed, Apr 05, 2023, 7:54 AM UTC

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #19

qeternity wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I remember the sad case of DataCentred:

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/datacentred-is-sh...

tl;dr even after getting a big public sector contract, a UK based cloud provider was killed off after scaling to meet demand which was then withdrawn. Attaining - and keeping - scale is extremely difficult. And that was just IaaS provision.

Re: Ofcom proposes to refer UK cloud market for investigation

#24

Post by 867-5309 » Wed, Apr 05, 2023, 8:04 AM UTC

zamnos wrote: post #17

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.

does google not do the same with their office products?

Re: Ofcom proposes to refer UK cloud market for investigation

#25

Post by was_a_dev » Wed, Apr 05, 2023, 8:05 AM UTC

867-5309 wrote: post #24

zamnos wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

does google not do the same with their office products?

My assumption would be the revenue from Microsofts office products to be at least an order of magnitude larger than Google's

Just my assumption however

Re: Ofcom proposes to refer UK cloud market for investigation

#26

Post by midasuni » Wed, Apr 05, 2023, 8:08 AM UTC

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #19

qeternity wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No one ever got fired for buying AWS

Re: Ofcom proposes to refer UK cloud market for investigation

#27

Post by samwillis » Wed, Apr 05, 2023, 8:09 AM UTC

If this is anything like the investigations into Mobile Browsers and Gaming I'm sure it will be shut down due to technicalities. See: https://theplatformlaw.blog/2023/04/04/into-uncharted-waters...

The one into online advertising also went nowhere: https://www.gov.uk/cma-cases/online-platforms-and-digital-ad...

I don't hold out much hope.

Re: Ofcom proposes to refer UK cloud market for investigation

#28

Post by joahua » Wed, Apr 05, 2023, 8:13 AM UTC

zamnos wrote: post #17

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.

True… and in practice how do you do anything without Azure AD? If all the juicy stuff is stored in 365 and therefore warrants P2 or E5 bundling, is it possible to unscramble the revenue egg?

If they can tease identity out, the rest gets easier.

Re: Ofcom proposes to refer UK cloud market for investigation

#29

Post by porker » Wed, Apr 05, 2023, 8:35 AM UTC

ibnbutlAn wrote: post #2

I wonder if the UK situation is worse/better than the rest of Europe here. At least there are Hertzner and OVH, but not sure if they are remotely comparable to AWS et al.

I don't know much about the situation in Europe, but in the UK once you move beyond the international cloud players most of our hosting is now owned by big conglomerates. The smaller companies have been bought up by iONOS, team.blue, HostEurope and others I can't recall.

They're not comparable to AWS but it has reduced choice and IMO customer support, as each individual company is cost-optimised into a brand and the actual hosting moved to the parent company's infrastructure.

Re: Ofcom proposes to refer UK cloud market for investigation

#30

Post by jwmoz » Wed, Apr 05, 2023, 9:02 AM UTC

They need to get the costs down. Unless you are big business or startup with funding, most cloud services are insanely priced. I was looking at Google the other day at some training, just wondered how much something like the API gateway cost and it was £12k for average use.