I hope this won’t be counted as some form of self-promotion, even though I am sharing a post from my own blog.
As a tech worker who works in a Cloud shop, I wanted to elaborate the many reasons why I find working with Clouds terrible, from multiple points of view.
I tried to organize my thoughts in a (relatively long) post, in which both technical aspects and political aspects (which are very related) are covered.
I am sure many people will have different perspectives, and this could be potentially also a nice prompt for a discussion.
If the storage “crashes” it doesn’t matter if it’s in the cloud or on-prem.
With the cloud you get two substantial advantages:
- the storage is built so it doesn’t break so easily. I trust AWS engineers more than Mike, no matter how cool Mike is to hang out with. Additionally, if the storage breaks while Mike is on vacation we’re screwed, with the cloud you get a whole team 24/7 on it.
- you can prevent data loss with backups or multi-region setups with a few clicks/terraform lines. Try telling the PO that you need to rent datacenter space in Helsinki and Singapore for redundancy…
Of course all this costs big bucks, but technically it’s superior, easier and less risky.
trust AWS engineers more than Mike, no matter how cool Mike is
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AWS engineers’ first responsibility is to shareholders
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Mike’s responsibility is to your same boss.
They are not the same.
Bonus: you can see Mike’s certs are real.
the storage is built so it doesn’t break so easily. I trust AWS engineers more than Mike, no matter how cool Mike is to hang out with. Additionally, if the storage breaks while Mike is on vacation we’re screwed, with the cloud you get a whole team 24/7 on it.
That’s easily mitigated just following established standards. Redundancy is cheaper than anything else in the aftermath and documentation can be done easy with automation.
you can prevent data loss with backups or multi-region setups with a few clicks/terraform lines. Try telling the PO that you need to rent datacenter space in Helsinki and Singapore for redundancy…
You don’t, you rent rack space in a location far enough away but close enough to get the data in a few hours.
It’s neither superior, easier or less risky, it’s just a shift in responsibility. And in most cases, it’s so expensive that a second or third on site engineer is payed for.
And what is simpler and faster, renting rack space in another continent (and buying, shipping, racking and initializing) or editing your terraform file?
Why on another continent? Except maybe VDI, some direct calls to some LLM or some insane scales, there’s nothing really that needs those round trip times.
Not OP, but they are comparable efforts, especially since it’s a relatively infrequent activity. You can rent dedicated boxes with off-the-sheld hardware almost instantly, if you don’t want to deal with the hardware procurement, and often you can do that via APIs as well. And of course both options are much, much, much cheaper than the Cloud solution.
For sure speed in general is something Cloud provide. I would say it’s a very bad metric though in this context.
