Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ofcom proposes to refer UK cloud market for investigation

ofcom.org.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 90 posts

Re: Ofcom proposes to refer UK cloud market for investigation

#71

Post by galleywest200 »

JustLurking2022 wrote: post #62
geocar wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 bud…

As someone currently dealing with SOC in preparation for the company I work for going public, I will also confirm it is a giant bean-counting pain in the butt.

Re: Ofcom proposes to refer UK cloud market for investigation

#72

Post by globular-toast »

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.

Do people even understand what "free market" means? A free market is one with low or no barriers to entry for suppliers and perfect information available to consumers such that they can always make the optimal choice. How can anyone, especially on this site, think the cloud market is anywhere close to being free?

I think people are confused thinking free market means no regulation. No regulation leads to monopoly which is the furthest from a free market you can possibly get. People who seriously advocate for such things are ignorant fools. There are countless examples of how markets fail and that's why every major economy in the world has a government.

Re: Ofcom proposes to refer UK cloud market for investigation

#73

Post by amluto »

quesomaster9000 wrote: post #68
amluto wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ret…

I won’t argue with Glacier retrieval costs, although I don’t really believe they reflect actual costs.

But I will argue with egress. AWS and its friends charge absolutely outrageous amounts for egress:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress/

And the fact that they have made no move to reduce pricing to compete with R2 suggests that they are not actually motivated by making a profit on egress. I strongly suspect that they are motivated by lock-in: AWS wants you to minimize egress costs my moving more services into AWS. And this includes third-party services. In a competitive market, services like Crunchy Data, Pinecone, and Snowflake would ordinarily be hosted in their own datacenters or in colocation facilities, and customers would pay a hefty premium to use an AWS, Google or Azure version. But, since egress fees mean that a non-big-cloud variant can’t possibly be cost-effective for customers, these services don’t bother to offer. (And they can’t even be usefully competitive across clouds. If Azure wants to attract companies like Snowflake, reducing the amount they charge for storage and compute is entirely useless.)

I don’t know how to regulate this properly, but a price cap at some low (and ever-falling) figure wouldn’t be so horrible. Or requiring that egress be billed at the same rate as local traffic. (Although 100Gbps of same-rack traffic is cheap, whereas 100Gbps of egress is genuinely fairly expensive.)

As an aside: having recently priced Glacier vs commodity hardware, Glacier is reasonably priced for monthly storage but not particularly cheap. I suspect it exists in part to make customers feel better about moving large amounts of data into the cloud. AWS could likely still make a profit on it if the retrieval fee were decreased by a factor of 10. If I wanted to store a few hundred TB and access it a couple times a year, especially if that access is from outside AWS, then storing an on-prem copy is less expensive, and the best option may be an on-prem copy plus an archive in Glacier for disaster recovery.

Re: Ofcom proposes to refer UK cloud market for investigation

#75

Post by pc_edwin »

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…

At best you can say, its an unnecessary burden which is artificially created with the purpose of dissuading customers from leaving.

Only a small group of cloud customers would find this "burden" meaningful enough in monetary terms to even generate a report. In my view, this does not rise to the level of severity, scale, or type that would warrant regulatory intervention.

I believe the difference of opinion is political in nature, I'm fundamentally opposed to the government taking a kingmaker/referee role in the free market.

This is why I abhor the three letter agencies in America, especially the financial ones. These regulators especially in Europe are given immense power to arbitrarily decide whats right/wrong.

Re: Ofcom proposes to refer UK cloud market for investigation

#76

Post by eropple »

happymellon wrote: post #59
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.

Considering that Aurora has either a Postgres or MySqL interfaces, you could just dump them using the standard tools. That's probably not a great example of vendor lock-in.

This is true, but when you own a platform, you don't have to have nonstandard interfaces in order to lock a user in.

For example, they whack your self-hosted or other-vendor-in-AWS options with cross-AZ bandwidth charges that they exempt you from when using RDS.

Re: Ofcom proposes to refer UK cloud market for investigation

#77

Post by rguillebert »

stuaxo wrote: post #74
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.

Indeed, does a free market ensure a monopoly in the end ?

It depends on what you mean by free market, it's often used interchangeably with with laissez-faire capitalism but an important concept in a free market is that the barrier to entry for new competitors should be as low as realistically possible, so regulation that prevents vendor lock-in can be pro free market.

Re: Ofcom proposes to refer UK cloud market for investigation

#78

Post by InCityDreams »

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…

>This is exactly the type of intervention that crippled Europe's tech ecosystem.

...could be read as the "UK is in Europe." It's not, of course. Ofcom means nothing to us over here. Though I'm sure it'll be watched, and learned from.

Re: Ofcom proposes to refer UK cloud market for investigation

#79

Post by geocar »

JustLurking2022 wrote: post #62
geocar wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 bud…

No. At the end of the day, the customer pays, because I charge more for bullshit. They need an SOC to use my cloud product it cost me 150k USD to get an audit from a big-four for a single site in 2016. Maybe it’s a little more today, but it’s not an order-of-magnitude.

I’m assuming you already adhere to the relevant standards. Obviously if you’re cutting corners getting up to snuff is going to cost a lot more than a hundy.

Re: Ofcom proposes to refer UK cloud market for investigation

#80

Post by Mtinie »

re-thc wrote: post #47
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…

> PS: I am not saying security team are assholes, I am pointing out a major barrier to competition. > 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. ??? So what does this have to do with the security team at all? There is no "barrier" in that sense. In the past we've had more n…

> I met a CTO of a startup sometime ago that moved their entire operations from GCP to AWS because they were "more familiar with it". That's all.

Without knowing which startup you are referring to its hard to make a judgement as to the quality of the decision but you should not discount the role tooling familiarity has when developing software.

Post reply on HN