Re:Ask HN: Is Kubernetes the only alternative for being clou...
by abeld on Tuesday February 22, 2022 @01:56PM
(#30431975)
A reasonable requirement which leads to "run everything in VMs" is the need to support on-premise deployments. Often data-security and compliance requirements can be handled most reasonably (or at all) by allowing the enterprise client to pick where to deploy a single-tenant copy of the service. For this, I think the most reasonable approach is to only require VMs and do all the configuration yourself (preferably in some scripted / automated manner).
Of course, in this case, (unless you install a private cloud), you forgo all the convenience and advantages of a cloud infrastructure (so one can argue that this wouldn't really count as 'cloud agnostic'), but since such on-premise deployments should only be required by big enterprise clients, they should have deep enough pockets to pay for it.
What's the reasoning for that requirement, though?
I understand the fear of vendor lock-in, but if AWS decide to put their prices up tomorrow, it's non-trivial to just move everything to Azure (for example). Sure, you have some container images which are portable in theory.. but it's still a large undertaking.
I'd be interested to know if anybody has built with 'cloud agnostic' in mind, and actually needed to migrate to another provider.