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Dutch central bank ditches AWS and chooses Lidl for European Cloud

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Re: Dutch central bank ditches AWS and chooses Lidl for European Cloud

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole business model is around “Optimization through custom tools”. We can go with your idea, sure: a few months in, an Account Manager from the cloud provider shows up and says your bill could be reduced by 50% if you just adopt some changes, using their custom, super optimized tools (“minor changes” will be the mantra). And now you have your own company looking back to you on how can they get those savings, peo…

Do people actually take claims like that from glorified salesmen seriously? If a car salesman told me I could save 50% of my fuel bill from driving their special car a certain way I'd laugh at them.

You are missing the timeline factor here.

2016 - lets use EC2, its just VM, we can move off

2018 - I see you are hosting your own PostgreSQL in EC2, you can use our managed solution

2020 - you are already using 18 our services (note, at this point you might still be using non-vendor products, like VMs, managed DB, and so on), why not use our IAM instead of rolling out your own auth.

2024 - you are now deeply locked, lets add more lock-in, why don't you use this tool to optimize your costs (welcome DynamoDB)

At this point, no one would ever question next tool from salesman. Because engineers see that company doesnt have strategy to move to another cloud, why should they reject this new tool?

also consider the people who are involved, a lot of times after 2 years you have totally new people in your team, they won't have context and constraints you had in the past when deciding to buy "just VM", they see it as "we already use AWS"

Re: Dutch central bank ditches AWS and chooses Lidl for European Cloud

#52
post #37
post #5

Years ago I was making the case that instead of digging ourselves into the Amazon eco-system with S3 storage, EC2 instances, DynamoDB and various other Amazon specific cloud products... we should just host virtual machines and have everything in there using open source products. People looked at me like they saw water burning but that would have made the dependency on the US a lot easier to sever. Just move the VM's.

This is great, your suggestion to replace s3 and ddb is to run some VMs? I don’t blame people for being skeptical

Yea, op just handwaved away all scalability. Guessing their response would be 'launch more vms'.

Re: Dutch central bank ditches AWS and chooses Lidl for European Cloud

#53
post #5

Years ago I was making the case that instead of digging ourselves into the Amazon eco-system with S3 storage, EC2 instances, DynamoDB and various other Amazon specific cloud products... we should just host virtual machines and have everything in there using open source products. People looked at me like they saw water burning but that would have made the dependency on the US a lot easier to sever. Just move the VM's.

I prefer not using managed services but I kind of understand the appeal. Instead of paying several engineers, that you have to vet first, to configure and maintain the services adjacent to your product you can just pay AWS or Azure or someone else to maintain the service. Then you can concentrate your whole manpower on your product. In case the service goes down you can blame someone else and maybe even recover some…

In my experience it doesn’t take long until you use such complex offerings from the cloud vendors, you need those ops engineers anyways. Just with slightly different skillsets.

Re: Dutch central bank ditches AWS and chooses Lidl for European Cloud

#54
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is great, your suggestion to replace s3 and ddb is to run some VMs? I don’t blame people for being skeptical

Yea, op just handwaved away all scalability. Guessing their response would be 'launch more vms'.

Scalability is great, when you need it. Most companies don’t need it.

Re: Dutch central bank ditches AWS and chooses Lidl for European Cloud

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole business model is around “Optimization through custom tools”. We can go with your idea, sure: a few months in, an Account Manager from the cloud provider shows up and says your bill could be reduced by 50% if you just adopt some changes, using their custom, super optimized tools (“minor changes” will be the mantra). And now you have your own company looking back to you on how can they get those savings, peo…

Do people actually take claims like that from glorified salesmen seriously? If a car salesman told me I could save 50% of my fuel bill from driving their special car a certain way I'd laugh at them.

I save 75% on electricity vs diesel

Re: Dutch central bank ditches AWS and chooses Lidl for European Cloud

#58
post #5

Years ago I was making the case that instead of digging ourselves into the Amazon eco-system with S3 storage, EC2 instances, DynamoDB and various other Amazon specific cloud products... we should just host virtual machines and have everything in there using open source products. People looked at me like they saw water burning but that would have made the dependency on the US a lot easier to sever. Just move the VM's.

I've operated at companies using both models, and have observed similar reactions to suggestions of using the cloud.

To me it's like anything else in engineering, are the costs, risks, and benefits fully understood, and worth the tradeoff in the particular context.

I worked for a startup doing internet of things, the consumer would buy a device and get lifetime service baked in. And that company was a step further, just renting space in a colo was incredibly cost efficient, which supported the sales model and competitive landscape of that product. But it was also very costly to attention, one of the most valuable resources. But it can also get costly in non-intuitive ways, an example that comes to mind is we started to get interviews where a generation of candidates no longer had experience with metal, it was a foreign world to them.

With more experience, I find it's really the costs that get severely underestimated, both for and against the suggestion.

Re: Dutch central bank ditches AWS and chooses Lidl for European Cloud

#59
post #5

Years ago I was making the case that instead of digging ourselves into the Amazon eco-system with S3 storage, EC2 instances, DynamoDB and various other Amazon specific cloud products... we should just host virtual machines and have everything in there using open source products. People looked at me like they saw water burning but that would have made the dependency on the US a lot easier to sever. Just move the VM's.

There was a period when development and system adminstrators were really concerned about vendor lock in and would choose on the basis of the ease of moving to a different platform, Java and J2EE was clearly based on this mindset. I have always found it odd people have been willing to adopt AWS with no apparent easy route off given its price.

Still is, nowadays the standard is Jakarta EE 11, alongside Microprofile, which Spring also uses parts of.
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