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.
I’ve worked in a digital agency running out of an old barn out the back of a house, and a completely bootstrapped 4 person small business making a software product, and in both cases our AWS spend was absolutely negligible compared to say….salaries.
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…
100x better for you, but how much work are you causing to the security team that you're not counting?
Anyways, big corps aren't the only player. There's plenty of SMEs that don't care the slightest about using only the big clouds.
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…
The reality is that there’s myriad providers that simply do not provide the assurances that AWS/Azure/GCP do. Sure, there’s a bit of “use these, because we know them, and they work”, but there’s also a bit of “the typical developer is not at all across the security requirements, especially taking into account contractural obligations and regulated industries”.
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.
This is wild reading. The UK has tied its own hands in its ability to police these practices? This smells like a case where some pro-corporation lawyer wrote the original rules and put in a bunch of pointless constraints to make the process as difficult and cumbersome for the government as possible. For one thing the study period is 18 months? That seems like way too long. And all the procedural hurdles just seem busted. God I feel bad for the people working on this it's pretty obvious they'll never be able to overcome these barriers.
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?
They do, but they only started doing that after Microsoft did it.
To be fair to Google, they have a lot less experience with managing Wall Street through tactical use of accounting standards.
Just another example that a free market does not always ensure healthy competition and some times intervention is needed to level the playing field.
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.
> 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.
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.