MAG?

From context, I'm assuming Microsoft / Amazon / Google, referring to Azure / AWS / Google Cloud respectively.

Yep.

Because when I think reliable cloud infra, I think Azure.

I’m assuming Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, but it’s new to me too

Microsoft (azure) Amazon (aws) Google (gcloud)

They should have gone with GAA

microsoft apple google

if you add Akamai (Linode ) or Alibaba Cloud - then it will be come MAAG

MAGA?

Geez chill.

That's for top 4 companies by market cap.

MAGA cap?

oh no, not again.

Linode is not the same scale as the top 3. I believe even Digital Ocean is bigger than them (for now).

I am willing to pay a little extra for a nice dev/ops experience and simple/easy solutions that doesn't require spending days reading docs and diving into dashboards with thousands of options.

Usually this results in me jumping on new platforms and then abandoning them once they add too much complexity.

I suspect, in general, acceptability (or desire) for complexity in the cloud solution, and budget are positively correlated in customers.

The ridiculously overwhelming complexity is stickiness.

Think it’s bad to potentially technically move your solution from $CLOUD vendor? Wait until you turn around and realize you have at least one full time hire who’s entire role is “$BIGCLOUD Certified Architect” (or whatever) and your entire dev staff was also at least partially selected for experience with the preferred cloud vendor. At any kind of scale you have massive amounts of tooling, technical debt, and institutional knowledge built around the cloud provider of choice.

Then there’s all of the legal, actually understanding billing (pretty much impossible but you’re probably close by now), etc elsewhere in the org. At this point you’ve probably utilized an outside service/consultant or two from the entire cottage industry that has sprung up to plug holes in/augment your cloud provider of choice.

After realizing their cloud spend has ballooned well beyond what they ever anticipated plenty of orgs get far enough to investigate leaving before they realize all of this. Most decide to suck it up and keep paying, or try to somehow negotiate or optimize spend down further.

Cloud platforms are a true masterclass in customer stickiness and retention - to the Oracle and Microsoft level (who also operate clouds).

It’s interesting here on HN because while MS and Oracle are bashed for these practices AWS and GCP (for the most part) are pretty beloved for what are really the same practices.

This is really an oversimplification. MS and Oracle have licensing that's explicit in the way that it wants to lock you in, although in different ways. AWS and GCP posting public pricing that can apply all the way until you reach an absurd spend goes a long way, and the ability to turn off a workload tomorrow incentivizes these platforms to provide a high quality of service.

When working at AWS, a large part of the convincing for an MS shop would be around showing that we can offer a lower price than the 'discounting' that MS provides. Oracle was all about contract expiry.

While there's some complexity around migrating a workload, regardless of where it's at, many places are going into cloud migrations hoping to remain relatively platform agnostic. I've seen many successful migrations to and from different vendors, and often at an SMB or ME scale, in weeks not years.

Sadly I think you are likely correct.