Why is Multi-Cloud a Hard Problem? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why is Multi-Cloud a Hard Problem?

#11

Post by dkhenry » Sat, Apr 11, 2020, 8:49 AM UTC

9nGQluzmnq3M wrote: post #9

elabajaba wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everyone rips you off on egress fees the way Amazon/MS/Google do. Quite a few of the 2nd tier providers (eg. Vultr, Linode, Digital Ocean, Upcloud, etc) offer $0.01/GB for public outbound bandwidth with a free allowance each month (usually anywhere from 1-10+TB/month/instance depending on what you deployed). Some companies even waive fees for companies they're partnered with (eg. if you use Wasabi or Backblaze B2…

The article is specifically talking about their DB solution "across the three major cloud providers" = Amazon/MS/Google.

It's not mentioned in the blog, but we are actively working with other providers to bring them on board. Hopefully we will have Digital Ocean soon, and I am hoping for Packet after them

Re: Why is Multi-Cloud a Hard Problem?

#12

Post by ThePhysicist » Sat, Apr 11, 2020, 9:19 AM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #5

> Why use true multi-cloud clusters? > Two reasons: Disaster recovery and freedom from vendor lock in. In my experience, those two reasons are almost never sufficient to warrant a multi-cloud solution. The costs for multi-cloud are enormous. Another commenter mentioned egress costs, but there are numerous other costs: 1. You've added a lot of complexity on top of existing cloud solutions. That complexity can make thi…

Multi-cloud deployments often happen organically in large organizations, e.g. because there are always legacy systems, possibly different procurement processes in sub-companies, different legal requirements in national branches leading to the use of different vendors or acquisitions of companies with different tech stacks. And while consolidating all IT on a single platform sounds really tempting it can quickly become a disaster and spectacularly fail as well, so multi-cloud deployments are probably here to stay.

Re: Why is Multi-Cloud a Hard Problem?

#13

Post by 2ion » Sat, Apr 11, 2020, 9:35 AM UTC

> Abhi: Hi team! On the level of our Kubernetes operator, what do you think was the hardest challenge in making multi-cloud databases work?

Multi-cloud is a network problem. Ask anybody who knows what they're doing: is it the best idea to have dependencies over WAN? No. Can it be a solution to a problem? Yes, but what's your problem? PlanetScale might have a case if their product sells.

Then* only come the platform problems.

Re: Why is Multi-Cloud a Hard Problem?

#14

Post by closeparen » Sat, Apr 11, 2020, 9:36 AM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #5

> Why use true multi-cloud clusters? > Two reasons: Disaster recovery and freedom from vendor lock in. In my experience, those two reasons are almost never sufficient to warrant a multi-cloud solution. The costs for multi-cloud are enormous. Another commenter mentioned egress costs, but there are numerous other costs: 1. You've added a lot of complexity on top of existing cloud solutions. That complexity can make thi…

If you wouldn't buy the license key from Oracle, don't rent the network API from Amazon.

Proprietary software can be good in contexts where the integration surface is small. The denominator you want to code against in such a way that you become deeply intertwined with it & would have a hard time backing out is open source.

The "lowest common denominator" being Linux, Postgres, Kubernetes, etc. is not such a terrible thing.

Re: Why is Multi-Cloud a Hard Problem?

#15

Post by PeterStuer » Sat, Apr 11, 2020, 9:58 AM UTC

ThePhysicist wrote: post #12

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #5

> Why use true multi-cloud clusters? > Two reasons: Disaster recovery and freedom from vendor lock in. In my experience, those two reasons are almost never sufficient to warrant a multi-cloud solution. The costs for multi-cloud are enormous. Another commenter mentioned egress costs, but there are numerous other costs: 1. You've added a lot of complexity on top of existing cloud solutions. That complexity can make thi…

Multi-cloud deployments often happen organically in large organizations, e.g. because there are always legacy systems, possibly different procurement processes in sub-companies, different legal requirements in national branches leading to the use of different vendors or acquisitions of companies with different tech stacks. And while consolidating all IT on a single platform sounds really tempting it can quickly becom…

I think the parent topic is about deploying a single application across multiple cloud vendors, not having application A on Azure and application B on AWS

Re: Why is Multi-Cloud a Hard Problem?

#16

Post by Bombthecat » Sat, Apr 11, 2020, 10:17 AM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #5

> Why use true multi-cloud clusters? > Two reasons: Disaster recovery and freedom from vendor lock in. In my experience, those two reasons are almost never sufficient to warrant a multi-cloud solution. The costs for multi-cloud are enormous. Another commenter mentioned egress costs, but there are numerous other costs: 1. You've added a lot of complexity on top of existing cloud solutions. That complexity can make thi…

There is a reason : quit a cew saas provider are on only one cloud... Sooo if you want or need to use a service and want a good connection, you need to go with a few things to the other cloud provider...

Re: Why is Multi-Cloud a Hard Problem?

#17

Post by k__ » Sat, Apr 11, 2020, 11:11 AM UTC

Funny thing is, if those multi-cloud proponents would go in 100% on one provider, things would go much smoother and they would have less reasons to go multi-cloud in the end.

But yeah, when I look at the rate that some companies sunset their products, I understand the fear a bit.

Re: Why is Multi-Cloud a Hard Problem?

#18

Post by hn_throwaway_99 » Sat, Apr 11, 2020, 2:52 PM UTC

dkhenry wrote: post #6

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #5

> Why use true multi-cloud clusters? > Two reasons: Disaster recovery and freedom from vendor lock in. In my experience, those two reasons are almost never sufficient to warrant a multi-cloud solution. The costs for multi-cloud are enormous. Another commenter mentioned egress costs, but there are numerous other costs: 1. You've added a lot of complexity on top of existing cloud solutions. That complexity can make thi…

I was one of the individuals who helped put this together and hopefully can answer your question. Specifically about complexity and the productivity of going multi-cloud. Here is what we found, previously when people talked about going to the cloud the state of the art was everything is done targeting a specific cloud provider, you put your software in immutable AMI's and you use ASG, and ELB, along with S3 and EBS t…

Thanks for the response. While I certainly see the value of being provider agnostic, I just don't see the value of being multi-cloud within the same app or service.

I worked at a company that wrote an internal infrastructure/deploy management tool based on Kubernetes. You could deploy an app either to our colo facility (we were an old business transitioning to the cloud), or you could deploy it to AWS. As a developer I never interacted with the AWS console, this internal tool just hid it all from me. However, while I had the option of deploying to our colo or to the cloud, it was one or the other; the service was only running in one platform in prod.

And after a multi year push to the cloud, the company actually had to stop that huge push because costs were spiralling out of control. Managing all the costs across a huge enterprise of many services (some micro, some not) became a huge challenge. Can't even imagine the additional cost or complexity if some of those services spanned multiple cloud providers.

Re: Why is Multi-Cloud a Hard Problem?

#19

Post by different_sort » Sat, Apr 11, 2020, 5:20 PM UTC

The article was a good read, but I wanted to try to answer this from the perspective of a fortune 100 enterprise (I work for one, in their cloud team).

We're starting a journey on Azure and AWS at once with limited financial resources, and limited talent(it's tough to hire in cloud skills to work for us, and our stack is so old it's not an easy transition for people who only know that). Operating AWS and Azure and require different skill sets and different approaches and they're far from transferable. All the tools and techniques we develop or acquire for managing AWS are not applicable to Azure and vice versa, and because we're splitting our effort between the two everything takes twice as long.

I think the right way for a company like us to approach this would be to go "all in" in one, build expertise and offer a lot of value back to the business, then look to build out the second cloud to meet your BCP/Cost Savings goals.

Re: Why is Multi-Cloud a Hard Problem?

#20

Post by rubyn00bie » Sat, Apr 11, 2020, 6:36 PM UTC

dkhenry wrote: post #6

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #5

> Why use true multi-cloud clusters? > Two reasons: Disaster recovery and freedom from vendor lock in. In my experience, those two reasons are almost never sufficient to warrant a multi-cloud solution. The costs for multi-cloud are enormous. Another commenter mentioned egress costs, but there are numerous other costs: 1. You've added a lot of complexity on top of existing cloud solutions. That complexity can make thi…

I was one of the individuals who helped put this together and hopefully can answer your question. Specifically about complexity and the productivity of going multi-cloud. Here is what we found, previously when people talked about going to the cloud the state of the art was everything is done targeting a specific cloud provider, you put your software in immutable AMI's and you use ASG, and ELB, along with S3 and EBS t…

What does this mean: "PlanetScaleDB lets you use your existing MySQL compatible software"?

I thought you all were offering Vitess not a "custom" solution, or are you speaking marketing?