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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

#81

Post by cbeach »

happymellon wrote: post #58
cbeach wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least free markets -allow- competition. In socialism/communism all sectors become state monopolies, with no market incentive to provide a decent service, nor to compensate workers fairly.

You don't appear to understand what Socialism is. It makes sense with this being an American site, and most Americans think that Socialism is essentially the same thing as Communism (but then why define them as separate things?). Community, Cooperative, Employee owned are all forms of socialism. None of them prevent competition. > no market incentive to provide a decent service, nor to compensate workers fairly. If y…

Socialism is state ownership of the means of production.

"Community, Cooperative, Employee owned" are all concepts that can (and do) exist under a capitalist regime.

Socialism is very different, and it does prevent free markets.

Re: Ofcom proposes to refer UK cloud market for investigation

#82

Post by re-thc »

Mtinie wrote: post #80
re-thc wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> but you should not discount the role tooling familiarity has when developing software.

No 1 was familiar with the cloud when it 1st came out.

As to this scenario, clearly the whole company was running GCP so everyone minus the new CTO would be familiar with GCP vs something else.

Point exactly being that regardless of the security team or the developers - this familiarity that you mention or any other trait only applies to a select few in management.

Re: Ofcom proposes to refer UK cloud market for investigation

#83

Post by happymellon »

cbeach wrote: post #81
happymellon wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't appear to understand what Socialism is. It makes sense with this being an American site, and most Americans think that Socialism is essentially the same thing as Communism (but then why define them as separate things?). Community, Cooperative, Employee owned are all forms of socialism. None of them prevent competition. > no market incentive to provide a decent service, nor to compensate workers fairly. If y…

Socialism is state ownership of the means of production. "Community, Cooperative, Employee owned" are all concepts that can (and do) exist under a capitalist regime. Socialism is very different, and it does prevent free markets.

> Socialism is state ownership of the means of production.

This is fundamentally wrong.

You should probably read about it before making statements that make you look foolish.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism

Socialism is about social not state ownership of the means of production. This does not prevent the state being involved either, and even then they can be a joint-stock corporation's.

Re: Ofcom proposes to refer UK cloud market for investigation

#84

Post by robertlagrant »

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...

I think that's something slightly different. I'm not saying AD would be easy to replace in an existing org, with existing software. I'm saying the job it does for most orgs seems fairly basic (i.e. be the system of record for users and groups, which map on to OIDC users/groups in individual apps for all the day to day permissions work).

Re: Ofcom proposes to refer UK cloud market for investigation

#85

Post by cbeach »

happymellon wrote: post #83
cbeach wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Socialism is state ownership of the means of production. "Community, Cooperative, Employee owned" are all concepts that can (and do) exist under a capitalist regime. Socialism is very different, and it does prevent free markets.

> Socialism is state ownership of the means of production. This is fundamentally wrong. You should probably read about it before making statements that make you look foolish. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism Socialism is about social not state ownership of the means of production. This does not prevent the state being involved either, and even then they can be a joint-stock corporation's.

As I said, "social" ownership of the means of production can occur in a capitalist country with free markets.

A socialist regime, like the USSR, North Korea, or Mao's China would have state ownership. The founding fathers of modern socialist thought (e.g. Marx) would define socialism in terms of state ownership of the means of production.

But feel free to muddy the waters if you prefer to avoid concrete definitions.

Re: Ofcom proposes to refer UK cloud market for investigation

#86

Post by Moissanite »

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…

> I think all of the cloud vendors are priced with just enough profit to make sure of it

Profit margins on cloud computing are insanely high (at least, relative to my expectations). They basically have no interest in anything with less than a 15% margin, even at the massive scale they operate at. Certain products have triple-digit margins. Even if they are the minority, I don't think we can give them a pass with claims of "just enough profit".

Re: Ofcom proposes to refer UK cloud market for investigation

#87

Post by Moissanite »

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.

Azure is indeed substantially smaller than AWS, and hides it with 365 revenue. The estimates I've seen suggest that in terms of true cloud infrastructure, the next 3 providers combined are still not quite as big as AWS.

Re: Ofcom proposes to refer UK cloud market for investigation

#88

Post by hkt »

nly wrote: post #40
hkt wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you're scaling your whole business for one customer based on one contract then you better be sure you can either scale down again, or the contract has safeguards in it to stop a rugpull.

You're not wrong, but the public sector should probably not be pulling the rug out from underneath anyone.

Re: Ofcom proposes to refer UK cloud market for investigation

#89

Post by oarsinsync »

dageshi wrote: post #61
oarsinsync wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

The risk to Amazon of enabling you to scale up low end instances on demand is relatively low.

The risk of doing the same with high end instances is a different story.

Low risk & high margin products make for a highly profitable business. High risk and lower margin products less so.

Their target audience is people that can be equally well served by digital ocean and their ilk, but are happy to pay the Amazon premium.

It’s a good business model for Amazon, and a terrible value proposition for the customer who may not know better, and thinks they’re paying to de-risk their potential future growth requirements. The cost of migrating out then becomes prohibitive (both in technical hours and egress fees), so you like it or lump it, but either way, you likely just wait and/or pay Amazon more.

Until you can’t.

Re: Ofcom proposes to refer UK cloud market for investigation

#90

Post by JustLurking2022 »

geocar wrote: post #79
JustLurking2022 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A Big 4 can't conduct a proper SOC audit without access to the cloud providers internal controls/processes. That's the problematic/expensive part since it requires a bunch of time from the cloud provider, which they will also likely want to bill for.
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