Of course any migration has costs. But if they are higher because of deep entanglements in specific cloud vendor services, that is a vulnerability. It's already demonstrated that the big cloud providers will cut you off with little warning if you run afoul of their political sensibilities. So the only way to use those services is in the most generic way you can, so that migrations don't cost more because of it.

I’ve seen this parroted so often with anything infrastructure related. Where do you magical people work that your company has managed to somehow find the time to build out infrastructure that you can swap out to another provider on a whim? My assumption is you must already self-host and run everything without using any external providers.

> somehow find the time to build out infrastructure that you can swap out to another provider on a whim?

You can very much do that while staying in the cloud. It's all about engineering for flexibility.

Ok.. so that still doesn't answer my question. How do you get the time and resources allocated to make your entire platform completely agnostic of specific cloud services while still operating in the cloud? Can you name a single company where that's done and they talked about it at all? We're talking about at least tripling developer workloads and general operating costs here and finding developers who can navigate different cloud and on-premise providers for... what?

Even small companies have multiple engineering teams, and each of those teams has particular needs, and each of the engineers, analysts or general users may rely on some service AWS, GCP or some other cloud provider has. Any single person can now break this ideal flexibility requirement if it makes their life easier.

Happens all the time. I personally worked at co that went from aws to gcp and now are moving to azure and know of a few who did the same. So if you can change clouds you could move to onprem presumably if you can find folks who know how and don’t already work for your cloud provider

My question was towards:

> It's already demonstrated that the big cloud providers will cut you off with little warning if you run afoul of their political sensibilities. So the only way to use those services is in the most generic way you can, so that migrations don't cost more because of it.

You are stating that you moved from one cloud to another. The question is how you manage to build a company of any size that can just flip a switch and move to a new service provider without needing to transition teams to using new services and that costing money. If we're talking about moving a simple server from AWS to GCP, sure that's no problem. But if you or anyone at your company is actually using a cloud providers services for more than hosting a server, there is no possible way you can just flip a switch and migrate over.

I’m talking about annual cloud spends in tens of millions here. It’s doable but you have to design for this or it takes a long time

It seems that the question you are answering, and that I don’t disagree with and am not asking is ‘can you move to a different service provider?’. Not ‘how do you move to a different service provider without incurring costs to transition to different services?’, which is what my question actually is.

The cost is one time and can be relatively contained. Also if you design for redundancy you dont have to do a hard cutoff - just deploy your next region to a dc/different cloud and then gradually drain old ones.

And if you are spending in the tens of millions, any cloud provider is going to negotiate discounts with you to keep you on board.

You’re not getting retail price.

So you’re still spending more trying to maintain “cloud agnosticism” by hosting everything on VMs instead of using managed services.

The discount is not as much as you’d think. They’ll do it for some high margin services like storage and gpu (where markup is just ridiculous) but won’t budge on network for some reason. In the end they gon getcha anyway

Oh and btw the models that i had worked out had ~10-12mo breakeven for colo vs cloud including the discount since you’re doing 3y commit anyway. If you’re going with private dc you have to be really large to make it work but if you have large egress charge it becomes instantly worth it (like in dropbox case)

How’s that working for Dropbox? They aren’t exactly a shining example of moving from the cloud and becoming extremely profitable. They still haven’t made a GAAP profit.

Like Jobs said, Dropbox is a feature not a product.

For the same price you pay for Dropbox and 2TB, you can get the full Office 365 suite plus 6TB of storage or the entire GSuite.

And do you have multiple redundant DCs? Are all of your database writes duplicated 6x across three DCs like Aurora?

> How’s that working for Dropbox? They aren’t exactly a shining example of moving from the cloud and becoming extremely profitable. They still haven’t made a GAAP profit.

That’s just silly - dropbox is profitable if you exclude stock comp unlike box inc (who afaik runs in cloud) and also has higher margins (big shocker here). From techincal side i hear it worked out really well for them too.

> Like Jobs said, Dropbox is a feature not a product.

What does that have to do with anything? Not helping your argument at all

> For the same price you pay for Dropbox and 2TB, you can get the full Office 365 suite plus 6TB of storage or the entire GSuite.

Should be painfully obvious to anyone arguing in good faith why that is. Also do you by any chance think google runs gsuite on aws or gcp?

> And do you have multiple redundant DCs? Are all of your database writes duplicated 6x across three DCs like Aurora?

Yes, you run mutiple redunant colos/dcs and peer them. You’re making it sound like rocket science but it really isn’t. If Internet Archive can do it with their resources (not a dig towards their talent at all) so can unicorns flush with vc cash who supposedly hire “the best”

Dropbox is profitable as long as you exclude the fact that they have to pay people…

How many people who are comparing their costs to using a cloud provider are ignoring redundancy?

And I’m sure your average startup has the capability to maintain their own redundant data center. Besides, does it add business value? Would they really be better off hiring multiple infrastructure people or just paying a cloud provider.

It doesn’t matter why it’s the case. People keep bringing up Dropbox as a shining example of moving away from a cloud provider - and still not being profitable. But ignore a little company - Netflix - that did just the opposite.

And if you are using cloud just as an overpriced colo, you aren’t really getting any advantage of being in the cloud. You’re going up spend more money hosting all your own infrastructure on VMs, more time on maintenance, and does it add any business value?

Do you not use IAM? Cloud specific infrastructure as code (again TF has cloud specific provisioners), permissions, compliance, training.

The articles mentions many basic advantages of using cloud platforms as simple infrastructure, without entangling your usage with vendor-specific, proprietary services. Scalability is an obvious one.