‘AWS vs. K8s’ Is the New ‘Windows vs. Linux’

You missed the point that moving from AWS to GCP or Azure is going to be _extremely_ complex and expensive if you have used all those shiny AWS platform features. It is very easy if you are using k8s.

The author put scare quotes around the "real workloads" AWS can handle/solve for. I'm not sure the author really has the experience to know what real big workloads look like. OpenBet? Barclays? Doesn't sound like a background in large scale technical problems that gets to sneer at the workload sizes of others.

I'll admit my biases -- I used to work at AWS and I'm a happy customer. But if you don't understand it or don't have the appropriate technical needs for that level of infrastructure, don't try to draw such a poor analogy and make really weird claims.

> There are limits on all sorts of resources that help define what you can and can’t achieve.

Huh? Yeah, of course... Certain tools have certain purposes, built to solve specific problems. Kind of like the UNIX philosophy. Do one thing and do it well. You know about the UNIX philosophy, right? Limits? Everything has limits.

> In the same way, some orgs get to the point where they could see benefits from building their own data centres again. Think Facebook, or for a full switcher, Dropbox. (We’ll get back to this).

You should build your own data center if it is strategically advantageous for your company to be in the data center business. I'd argue that Facebook is in the data center business mostly for historical and timing reasons, and that for Dropbox, it actually might be a strategic advantage because they're basically, uh, an infrastructure company.

> Which brings us to AWS’s relationship with Kubernetes. It’s no secret that AWS doesn’t see the point of it.

Actually, I do think it's a secret. It must be your little secret to yourself, though, because I don't think anyone else thinks this. Could it just be that building a product takes time and people?

> IAM is the true source of AWS lock-in (and Lambda is the lock-in technology par excellence. You can’t move a server if there are none you can see).

Have you ever even built anything on cloud infrastructure? Doesn't seem like it from your writing. Lock-in is a really uncharitable synonym for "solves a difficult problem well."

Also, Lambda is about the easiest thing to migrate I can think of. Its surface area that your code touches is remarkably small, by design. If anything, it's fairly clear there were many opportunities for Lambda to make product decisions that could've really locked customers in -- which they elected not to take.

(Typed on a phone, forgive typos.)

This one thousand times over. Lots of companies have multi-cloud on their strategy but when it's time to actually implement it they find that the cost to adopt hyperscaler #2 is just the same or even more as they spent on integrating hyperscaler #1. While Kubernetes makes workloads portable between vendors, organizational processes for "boring" chores like IAM, tenant provisioning and billing/chargeback aren't. Integration of these processes can get really expensive if you need to re-implement basic "enterprise" process like e.g. four-eyes-principle/seperation of duty on role assignments for each of your cloud vendors and technologies. The IAM systems differ ever so slightly across vendors and that brings a ton of complexity.

The larger the company, the more likely it is that the real bottleneck to cloud adoption is on these processes, not the technology. I know it's hard to imagine if you're coming from a startup background where you can just take the company credit card and get an account on AWS, GCP or Azure in a second. But for developers in big co., acquiring a public cloud account may take months and forms over forms of paperwork, getting roles put into the central corporate directory etc. The investment into these (often atrocious) processes for hyperscaler #1 create a big lock-in.

Disclaimer: I'm a founder at Meshcloud, we build a multi-cloud platform that helps organizations consistently implement organizational processes like IAM, SSO, landing zone configurations etc. across cloud vendors and platforms.