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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

#41

Post by gnufx »

porker wrote: post #29
ibnbutlAn wrote: post #2

I wonder if the UK situation is worse/better than the rest of Europe here. At least there are Hertzner and OVH, but not sure if they are remotely comparable to AWS et al.

I don't know much about the situation in Europe, but in the UK once you move beyond the international cloud players most of our hosting is now owned by big conglomerates. The smaller companies have been bought up by iONOS, team.blue, HostEurope and others I can't recall. They're not comparable to AWS but it has reduced choice and IMO customer support, as each individual company is cost-optimised into a brand and the…

At least, post-Bytemark, there's still Mythic Beasts.

Re: Ofcom proposes to refer UK cloud market for investigation

#42

Post by oarsinsync »

midasuni wrote: post #26
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…

No one ever got fired for buying AWS

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

Re: Ofcom proposes to refer UK cloud market for investigation

#43

Post by oarsinsync »

cntainer wrote: post #18
qeternity wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 have the capacity unless we pay to reserve it up front.

At that point, it’s no different to running my own DC, where I already have 3 months of runway on my server pipeline anyway.

Re: Ofcom proposes to refer UK cloud market for investigation

#44

Post by robertlagrant »

joahua wrote: post #28
zamnos wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Ofcom proposes to refer UK cloud market for investigation

#45

Post by jimnotgym »

KyeRussell wrote: post #31
jwmoz wrote: post #30

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. Nothing insane about that.

It depends what you are using. I have seen the bill spiral after some innocuous sounding add ons. Add an apple server or thier managed ftp and start scaring yourself

Re: Ofcom proposes to refer UK cloud market for investigation

#46

Post by stefan_ »

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.

Companies are free to split up their reporting into as many arbitrary divisions and categories as they like. IBM has been playing this game for a while, putting all kinds of legacy business and whatever division they have left that is growing under a "Cloud" banner to show their strong "Cloud first transformation".

Re: Ofcom proposes to refer UK cloud market for investigation

#47

Post by re-thc »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #19
qeternity wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 non-cloud engineers than cloud. Using your experiment, if you told your IT team you wanted to move to the cloud (back then) to save a million dollars - do you think they'd sign off on it? No.

Who signed off on it? The bosses that believed in the "hype".

Who's in control and who has power? If the bosses want it to happen it will even if it doesn't make sense. They have the ability to fire the security team if they said no. Just like how ethical AI teams get fired...

The barrier is those in power still believe in the "hype" and don't know otherwise.

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.

Re: Ofcom proposes to refer UK cloud market for investigation

#48

Post by re-thc »

cntainer wrote: post #18
qeternity wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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. If you're a new fast growing business it will give you a competitive edge.

The magic if there is 1 is not the scale but the free credits. Startups can go years without paying and then it's all too late.

Scale is meaningless when it costs 10x more. Just have spare capacity and lots of it.

Re: Ofcom proposes to refer UK cloud market for investigation

#49

Post by 3np »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #19
qeternity wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's ironic, because the companies most aversive to alternatives might be in the best position to benefit from them.

Re: Ofcom proposes to refer UK cloud market for investigation

#50

Post by Jochim »

qeternity wrote: post #12
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.

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.

Major cloud costs are also proof that finance departments hate additional vendors.
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