I've heard all of these lip-service justifications before, but I've yet to see anybody actually publish data showing how they saved any money. Would love to be proven wrong by some hard data, but something tells me I won't be.
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I'm confident Figma isn't paying published rates for AWS. The transition might have helped them in their rate negotiations with AWS, or it might not have. Hard data on the money saved would be difficult to attribute.
The vast majority of corporate decisions are never justified by useful data analysis, before or after the fact.
Many are so-analyzed, but usually in ways that anyone who paid attention in high school science or stats classes can tell are so flawed that they’re meaningless.
We can’t even measure manager efficacy to any useful degree, in nearly all cases. We can come up with numbers, but they don’t mean anything. Good luck with anything more complex.
Very small organizations can probably manage to isolate enough variables to know how good or bad some move was in hindsight, if they try and are competent at it (… if). Sometimes an effect is so huge for a large org that it overwhelms confounders and you can be pretty confident that it was at least good or bad, even if the degree is fuzzy. Usually, no.
Big organizations are largely flying blind. This has only gotten worse with the shift from people-who-know-the-work-as-leadership to professional-managers-as-leadership.
There are large swaths of the b2b space where (for whatever reason) being in the same cloud is a hard business requirement.
There are good technical reasons for this. Anything latency or throughput sensitive is better done within the same datacenter. There have been submissions about an ffmpeg as a service company and a GPU over TCP company on HN recently that would significantly benefit from 'same cloud'.
True but if AWS knows your lock-in is less locked-in, I'd bet they'd more flexible when contracts are up for renewal. I mean it's possible the blog post's primary purpose was a shot across bow to their AWS account manager.
> it's possible the blog post's primary purpose was a shot across bow to their AWS account manager
Isn't it slightly depressing that this explanation is fairly (the most?) plausible?
Our state department of education is one of the biggest networks in the world with about half a million devices. They would occasionally publicly announce a migration to Linux.
This was just a Microsoft licensing negotiation tactic. Before he was CEO, Ballmer flew here to negotiate one of the contracts. The discounts were epic.
It looks like I'm implying that companies are successful in getting those things from a K8s transition, but I wasn't trying to say that, just thinking of the times when I've seen these migrations happen and relaying the stated aims. I agree, I think it can be a burner of dev time and a burden on the business as devs acquire the new skillset instead of doing more valuable work.
Likewise. I'm not sure Kubernetes famous complexity (and the resulting staff requirements) are worth it to preemptively avoid vendor lockin, and wouldn't be solved more efficiently by migrating to another cloud provider's native tools if the need arises.
Why would you assume it's lip-service?
Being vendor-locked into ECS means you must pay whatever ECS wants... using k8s means you can feasibly pick up and move if you are forced.
Even if it doesn't save money today it might save a tremendous amount in the future and/or provide a much stronger position to negotiate from.
Great in theory but in practice when you do K8s on AWS, the AWS stuff leaks through and you still have lock-in.
It doesn't have to be that way though. You can use the AWS ingress controller, or you can use ingress-nginx. You can use external secrets operator and tie it into AWS Secrets manager, or you can tie it into 1pass, or Hashicorp Vault.
Just like picking EKS you have to be aware of the pros and cons of picking the cloud provider tool or not. Luckily the CNCF is doing a lot for reducing vender lock in and I think it will only continue.
Then don't use the AWS stuff. You can bring your own anything that they provide.
This requires iron discipline. Maybe with some kind of linter for Terraform / kubectl it could be done.
Amazon ECS is and always has been free of charge. You pay for the underlying compute and other resources (just like you do with EKS, too), but not the orchestration service.
I don't understand why this "you shouldn't be vendor-locked" rationalization is taken at face value at all?
1. The time it will take to move to another cloud is proportional to the complexity of your app. For example, if you're a Go shop using managed persistence are you more vendor locked in any meaningful way than k8s? What's the delta here?
2. Do you really think you can haggle with the fuel-producers like you're MAERKS? No, you're more likely just a car driving around for a gas station with increasingly diminishing returns.
This year alone we've seen significant price increases from web services, including critical ones such as Auth. If you are vendor-locked into, say Auth0, and they increase their price 300%[1]... What choice do you have? What negotiation position do you have? None... They know you cannot leave.
It's even worse when your entire platform is vendor-locked.
There is nothing but upside to working towards a vendor-neutral position. It gives you options. Even if you never use those options, they are there.
> Do you really think you can haggle
At the scale of someone like Figma? Yes, they do negotiate rates - and a competent account manager will understand Figma's position and maximize the revenue they can extract. Now, if the account rep doesn't play ball, Figma can actually move their stuff somewhere else. There's literally nothing but upside.
I swear, it feels like some people are just allergic to anything k8s and actively seek out ways to hate on it.
[1] https://auth0.com/blog/upcoming-pricing-changes-for-the-cust...
Why skip point 1 and do some strange tangent on a SaaS product unrelated to using k8s or not?
Most people looking into (and using) k8s that are being told the "you most avoid vendor lock in!" selling point are nowhere near the size where it matters. But I know there's essentially bulk-pricing, as we have it where I work as well. That it's because of picking k8s or not however is an extremely long stretch, and imo mostly rationalization. There's nothing saying that a cloud move without k8s couldn't be done within the same amount of time. Or that even k8s is the main problem, I imagine it isn't since it's usually supposed to be stateless apps.
The point was about vendor lock, which you asserted is not a good reason to make a move, such as this. The "tangent" about a SaaS product was to make it clear what happens when you build your system in such a way as-to become entirely dependent on that vendor. Just because Auth0 is not part of one of the big "cloud" providers, doesn't make it any less vendor-locky. Almost all of the vendor services offered on the big clouds are extremely vendor-locked and non-portable.
Where you buy compute from is just as big of a deal as where you buy your other SaaS' from. In all of the cases, if you cannot move even if you had to (ie. it'll take 1 year+ to move), then you are not in a good position.
Addressing your #1 point - if you use a regular database that happens to be offered by a cloud provider (ie. Postgres, MySQL, MongoDB, etc) then you can pick up and move. If you use something proprietary like CosmoDB, then you are stuck or face significant efforts to migrate.
With k8s, moving to another cloud can be as simple as creating an account and updating your configs to point at the new cluster. You can run every service you need inside your cluster if you wanted. You have freedom of choice and mobility.
> Most people looking into (and using) k8s that are being told the "you most avoid vendor lock in!" selling point are nowhere near the size where it matters.
This is just simply wrong, as highlighted by the SaaS example I provided. If you think you are too small so it doesn't matter, and decide to embrace all of the cloud vendor's proprietary services... what happens to you when that cloud provider decides to change their billing model, or dramatically increases price? You are screwed and have no options but cough up more money.
There's more decisions to make and consider regarding choosing a cloud platform and services than just whatever is easiest to use today - for any size of business.
I have found that, in general, people are afraid of using k8s because it isn't trivial to understand for most developers. People often mistakenly believe k8s is only useful when you're "google scale". It solves a lot of problems, including reduced vendor-lock.
I would assume that the migration from ECS to something else would be a lot easier, compared to migrating from other managed services, such as S3/SQS/Kinesis/DynamoDB, and especially IAM, which ties everything together.