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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

#61

Post by dageshi »

oarsinsync wrote: post #43
cntainer wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> The magic of cloud is how quickly you can scale things up I see this spouted a lot, but my recent (last 6 months?) experience with AWS is that unless I pay up front to reserve a tonne of high end instances that I don’t necessarily need today, but might need tomorrow, I’m regularly running into capacity issues where I cannot spin up new instances of the metal that I want, and AWS support confirms they just don’t hav…

I wonder what the cause of that is? I think I've heard this sentiment elsewhere recently but I don't recall it in the past. So what's caused the capacity constraint?

Re: Ofcom proposes to refer UK cloud market for investigation

#62

Post by JustLurking2022 »

geocar wrote: post #60
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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. SOCS/PCI/etc is going to take maybe $100-200k. If you can save a million dollars you should do it. Hire an expert if you have to. Serious. I think it probably won't save you a million dollars, because I think all of the cloud ven…

Speaking as someone who went through this process at a large financial firm, you're off by at least an order of magnitude. You need a SOC1 audit of each product you plan to use, which is likely quite a few if you want to take full advantage. The big players should eventually be able to offer that for free once they've been through the process but, at least relatively recently, it was only true today if your cloud budget was tend of millions. That aside, you'll still need an audit of your usage of the cloud (i.e. how you deploy to it and handle movement of data back and forth). That'll always be on your dime.

Re: Ofcom proposes to refer UK cloud market for investigation

#63

Post by whereistimbo »

robertlagrant wrote: post #44
joahua wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree. And while I'm probably wrong, my impression is that so much of the parts of identity AD handles directly is simple these days. What's difficult is IT departments are used to AD.

https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1zjf2a/windows_ad...

Re: Ofcom proposes to refer UK cloud market for investigation

#64

Post by zamnos »

whereistimbo wrote: post #63
robertlagrant wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. And while I'm probably wrong, my impression is that so much of the parts of identity AD handles directly is simple these days. What's difficult is IT departments are used to AD.

https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1zjf2a/windows_ad...

That's nine years old so I'm not sure what your point is.

Re: Ofcom proposes to refer UK cloud market for investigation

#65

Post by pc_edwin »

This is exactly the type of intervention that crippled Europe's tech ecosystem. The cloud market is one of the most competitive in tech, with numerous strong and emerging players.

In addition to established giants such as AWS, Azure, and GCP, there are also healthy second-tier players such as Cloudflare, Akamai, and Digital Ocean. I can also list more than a dozen new startups in the space that got money thrown at them.

Furthermore, it's important to recognise that cloud companies struggle to lock in because of the competitive dynamics at play. You have 2 levers to pull, money and tech lock-in.

You can't go far with money without quickly reaching diminishing returns. At the core you have compute, databases and object storage. All off these have been abstracted to a point where its very tricky to create lock-in without creating strong adverse reactions from customers.

As someone who has been closely observing the industry for almost a decade, I have noticed a strong trend towards reduced lock-in.

Re: Ofcom proposes to refer UK cloud market for investigation

#66

Post by amluto »

pc_edwin wrote: post #65

This is exactly the type of intervention that crippled Europe's tech ecosystem. The cloud market is one of the most competitive in tech, with numerous strong and emerging players. In addition to established giants such as AWS, Azure, and GCP, there are also healthy second-tier players such as Cloudflare, Akamai, and Digital Ocean. I can also list more than a dozen new startups in the space that got money thrown at th…

I’ll quote directly from the article:

> High fees for transferring data out, committed spend discounts and technical restrictions are making it difficult for business customers to switch cloud provider or use multiple providers

The technical restrictions are, as you say, not clearly creating lock-in. The committed spend discounts seem like a gray area. But the egress fees are no joke, and I consider them extremely anti-competitive.

Re: Ofcom proposes to refer UK cloud market for investigation

#67

Post by pc_edwin »

pc_edwin wrote: post #65

This is exactly the type of intervention that crippled Europe's tech ecosystem. The cloud market is one of the most competitive in tech, with numerous strong and emerging players. In addition to established giants such as AWS, Azure, and GCP, there are also healthy second-tier players such as Cloudflare, Akamai, and Digital Ocean. I can also list more than a dozen new startups in the space that got money thrown at th…

Regarding the political aspect, I strongly disagree with the notion of attacking these companies just for the sake of being actually really good (and big).

The EU alternatives are notably inferior, they constantly find themselves playing catch-up, which could be attributed to a weaker anti-tech ecosystem.

The tech giants in America are able to innovate at a rapid pace due to a robust ecosystem that encourages experimentation and dogfooding. Google, for example, developed MapReduce and Kubernetes out of necessity, while Amazon and Microsoft also heavily rely on their in-house innovations.

You can make a similar argument with Cloudflare and Akamai, these offerings were not only welcomed, they needed to exist in the American tech ecosystem.

You see similar ecosystem dynamics at play in China with hardware.

Re: Ofcom proposes to refer UK cloud market for investigation

#68

Post by quesomaster9000 »

amluto wrote: post #66
pc_edwin wrote: post #65

This is exactly the type of intervention that crippled Europe's tech ecosystem. The cloud market is one of the most competitive in tech, with numerous strong and emerging players. In addition to established giants such as AWS, Azure, and GCP, there are also healthy second-tier players such as Cloudflare, Akamai, and Digital Ocean. I can also list more than a dozen new startups in the space that got money thrown at th…

I’ll quote directly from the article: > High fees for transferring data out, committed spend discounts and technical restrictions are making it difficult for business customers to switch cloud provider or use multiple providers The technical restrictions are, as you say, not clearly creating lock-in. The committed spend discounts seem like a gray area. But the egress fees are no joke, and I consider them extremely an…

I don't see how committed spend discounts are different from contractual B2B pricing in every other industry. I can also see why egress bandwidth can be expensive for e.g. server farms, the contention ratio is (usually) significantly higher than it is for ingress.

How would you propose PAYG/SaaS bandwidth pricing is altered to be more competitive, or for example Amazon Glacier retrieval is heinously expensive for retrieval but it's transparent and IMO has a fair reflection of the underlying costs involved.

Re: Ofcom proposes to refer UK cloud market for investigation

#69

Post by Closi »

amluto wrote: post #66
pc_edwin wrote: post #65

This is exactly the type of intervention that crippled Europe's tech ecosystem. The cloud market is one of the most competitive in tech, with numerous strong and emerging players. In addition to established giants such as AWS, Azure, and GCP, there are also healthy second-tier players such as Cloudflare, Akamai, and Digital Ocean. I can also list more than a dozen new startups in the space that got money thrown at th…

I’ll quote directly from the article: > High fees for transferring data out, committed spend discounts and technical restrictions are making it difficult for business customers to switch cloud provider or use multiple providers The technical restrictions are, as you say, not clearly creating lock-in. The committed spend discounts seem like a gray area. But the egress fees are no joke, and I consider them extremely an…

The technical restrictions point is more on IaaS services which may generate lock-in.

i.e. If a company builds a lot of their infrastructure on Azure Cosmos can they easily move across to a smaller cloud provider?

Re: Ofcom proposes to refer UK cloud market for investigation

#70

Post by bsagdiyev »

oarsinsync wrote: post #42
midasuni wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one ever got fired for buying AWS

Fired? No. Laid off when the business went bust? Yep.

Or the spend on AWS got out of control and they needed to save money. Looking at you Sony Interactive Entertainment...
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