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retired 8 hours ago [-]
Years ago I was making the case that instead of digging ourselves into the Amazon eco-system with S3 storage, EC2 instances, DynamoDB and various other Amazon specific cloud products... we should just host virtual machines and have everything in there using open source products.
People looked at me like they saw water burning but that would have made the dependency on the US a lot easier to sever. Just move the VM's.
kevin_nisbet 6 hours ago [-]
I've operated at companies using both models, and have observed similar reactions to suggestions of using the cloud.
To me it's like anything else in engineering, are the costs, risks, and benefits fully understood, and worth the tradeoff in the particular context.
I worked for a startup doing internet of things, the consumer would buy a device and get lifetime service baked in. And that company was a step further, just renting space in a colo was incredibly cost efficient, which supported the sales model and competitive landscape of that product. But it was also very costly to attention, one of the most valuable resources. But it can also get costly in non-intuitive ways, an example that comes to mind is we started to get interviews where a generation of candidates no longer had experience with metal, it was a foreign world to them.
With more experience, I find it's really the costs that get severely underestimated, both for and against the suggestion.
ghaff 5 hours ago [-]
Especially in larger organizations, it's easy to lose track of all the distributed soft costs that DIY can bring (and all the bus factors that may be involved). There are lots of people that kinda want to get paid and get benefits and which require some level of management structure.
At some point, you have people (on here and elsewhere) questioning what all these people in an organization do. PART of the answer is that they're doing internal work that could have been outsourced in various ways.
lmf4lol 6 hours ago [-]
I am running my startup out of a self build GPU server from our office with a backup to the cloud.
I only pay for the IP address as electricity is included in the rent.
If the startup fails, Ill have thousand other potential use case for it and in the worst case, it will make for a awesome gaming machine.
The machine is a beast and I can serve a lot of users with it. In fact, and quite funnily, I already serve much more users with it than a lot of my older clients do with their software running on expensive k8s setup because „scale“ :-)
And last, but not least, I had a lot of fun building it. Its just nice to hear that thing humming away in the corner.
dzhiurgis 9 minutes ago [-]
How does your startup setup applies to a bank?
throwaway894345 5 hours ago [-]
> The machine is a beast and I can serve a lot of users with it. In fact, and quite funnily, I already serve much more users with it than a lot of my older clients do with their software running on expensive k8s setup because „scale“ :-)
Honestly even if you have a single server, running k8s (or maybe Docker Compose for really simple cases) on it is still the simplest way to manage it (assuming you have more than 1 service, anyway). One configuration file format, one CLI tool, zero special paths to memorize, no filesystem permissions to configure, pretty good security out of the box, access to a whole bunch of helm charts and operators (for example, cert-manager, external-dns, prometheus, alert-manager, some logging operator for centralized logging with a decent UI and search, and a postgres operator for backups / replication / failover), etc.
ozgrakkurt 3 hours ago [-]
This depends on what you know. Kubernetes is really not that good for me
xfactorial 8 hours ago [-]
The whole business model is around “Optimization through custom tools”.
We can go with your idea, sure: a few months in, an Account Manager from the cloud provider shows up and says your bill could be reduced by 50% if you just adopt some changes, using their custom, super optimized tools (“minor changes” will be the mantra).
And now you have your own company looking back to you on how can they get those savings, people who don’t understand what a VM is and cannot differentiate salesforce from an elastic container, as everything is “cloud”, but heard “50% off”.
walrus01 8 hours ago [-]
Preventing this from happening requires a clued-in CTO and equivalent senior level leadership who can defend against such 'attack' methods and knows the difference between, for instance, paying a monthly recurring cost to host a Linux/KVM virtual machine and paying for some totally 'cloud' SaAs.
Further, it needs people in decision making roles who understand and value the strategic differences between having an infrastructure concept that is trapped in one provider's proprietary software tooling ecosystem (aws, azure, etc), vs things built on open standards that are portable.
eddythompson80 4 hours ago [-]
> Preventing this from happening requires a clued-in CTO and equivalent senior level leadership
Most CTOs (and increasingly M2s and M3s) I've met are what I call "box architects". You know the ones who love drawing boxes, moving one box inside another box, drawing a line between 2 boxes or changing a unidirectional arrow into a bidirectional one, then declaring the hard part is done and now we need any random engineer to implement that or "Is there an AWS service that does that? I just don't see the value in us doing it in house".
A "super optimized tools" is just a box that you swap for another box and the "minor changes" will be just a couple of arrows than need to change or another box to swap for another box. You get them to feel good about doing architect stuff plus the 10x reduction in the bill. They can always replace that box with another box later after all.
kriberg 4 hours ago [-]
We call those people PowerPoint architects. They haven't coded or built anything for so long, if ever, that they wouldn't even how to, by this point. The only tool they know is PowerPoint and their slides have more boxes with words than any big box store
palmotea 6 hours ago [-]
> Preventing this from happening requires a clued-in CTO and equivalent senior level leadership who can defend against such 'attack' methods and knows the difference between, for instance, paying a monthly recurring cost to host a Linux/KVM virtual machine and paying for some totally 'cloud' SaAs.
And the reality is eventually you'll get a clueless one, and everything will revert to the mean.
And the mean is heavily influenced by marketing propaganda.
Muromec 5 hours ago [-]
This is true, but making money in any business is constantly fighting against the entropy and regression to the mean. Also, maybe, just maybe it's an example of relative competitive advantage and paying more for the AWS is the right call.
RobotToaster 7 hours ago [-]
Do people actually take claims like that from glorified salesmen seriously?
If a car salesman told me I could save 50% of my fuel bill from driving their special car a certain way I'd laugh at them.
throwaw12 6 hours ago [-]
You are missing the timeline factor here.
2016 - lets use EC2, its just VM, we can move off
2018 - I see you are hosting your own PostgreSQL in EC2, you can use our managed solution
2020 - you are already using 18 our services (note, at this point you might still be using non-vendor products, like VMs, managed DB, and so on), why not use our IAM instead of rolling out your own auth.
2024 - you are now deeply locked, lets add more lock-in, why don't you use this tool to optimize your costs (welcome DynamoDB)
At this point, no one would ever question next tool from salesman. Because engineers see that company doesnt have strategy to move to another cloud, why should they reject this new tool?
also consider the people who are involved, a lot of times after 2 years you have totally new people in your team, they won't have context and constraints you had in the past when deciding to buy "just VM", they see it as "we already use AWS"
retired 4 hours ago [-]
2025 - You start using Amazon S3 with pre-signed URLs and serve those directly to your customers. Great, now your customers are also locked into AWS.
green7ea 6 hours ago [-]
I had many conversations with a former boss about the Azure sales team. They would come in, say they can do it cheaper, simpler and better — he was immediately convinced.
I would do a calculation based on their public price plan and come up with a 5-10x price compared to the bare metal OVH solution that perfectly fit our use case. I would then ask the sales team where I made a mistake in my calculation and hear nothing back.
A few months later, they would come back with the same pitch and the whole process would repeat...
piperswe 7 hours ago [-]
They're probably not wrong, if they're talking about hypermiling a Prius
thebruce87m 6 hours ago [-]
I save 75% on electricity vs diesel
pvtmert 5 hours ago [-]
AWS has been (blatantly) using Microsoft method of making their way in. Redis, Elasticsearch, whatnot, all follow the same procedure: 1. Here is a managed service. 2. Here is a fork of the managed service where we manage the server (you don't see) with 15% off in price/credits. Easier backups with clicks etc. 3. We are dropping support of managed-X, move to our fork. 4. Due to the market conditions, our forked service is now 50% more expensive. 5. Ah also, you cannot export/download your backups because they are in proprietary format. 6. Locked-in.
SpicyLemonZest 6 hours ago [-]
You'd be wrong to laugh at them, because different cars of the same general size can indeed vary 50% or more in fuel efficiency. It's fair to be skeptical of promises of huge savings, and question why your counterparty would benefit from giving you those savings, but sometimes there's a good reason.
hermanzegerman 2 hours ago [-]
Name one example of a 2026 car with the same size, fuel type and class where the difference in mileage is >=50%
I have a very hard time believing this, especially with fuel economy and emission regulations
SpicyLemonZest 57 minutes ago [-]
The 2026 Toyota Corolla GR has 22mpg combined, and the normal 2026 Corolla has 35mpg with gas or 50mpg with a hybrid powertrain.
It is true that fuel economy regulations make it much less practical to deliver gas guzzlers out of pure laziness. (As you may know, the Corolla GR is by far the most expensive of these options, because it's designed to achieve horsepower over mileage.)
walrus01 7 hours ago [-]
> Do people actually take claims like that from glorified salesmen seriously?
People who know the tech, no
Non-technical middle management types, yes. It produces revenue when done aggressively enough, google "solarwinds sales people" for many anecdotal examples of extreme persistence. Not that I agree with it.
BadBadJellyBean 7 hours ago [-]
I prefer not using managed services but I kind of understand the appeal. Instead of paying several engineers, that you have to vet first, to configure and maintain the services adjacent to your product you can just pay AWS or Azure or someone else to maintain the service. Then you can concentrate your whole manpower on your product. In case the service goes down you can blame someone else and maybe even recover some money. On the other hand it of course makes you dependent on the provider.
lelanthran 6 hours ago [-]
> Instead of paying several engineers, that you have to vet first, to configure and maintain the services adjacent to your product you can just pay AWS or Azure or someone else to maintain the service.
Your engineers who all have to possess AWS or similar certs before you hire them, work for free?
A move off VPS to managed services doesn't reduce your headcount or labour costs.
BadBadJellyBean 4 hours ago [-]
You are correct. Someone has to manage and plan the infra. But that is the same for on prem or other non cloud. What you don't necessary need is several database admins, several network admins, several kubernetes admins, etc. I don't necessarily agree, but that is the calculation. Azure hires the 24/7 admins for the service and you pay a bit more to get a share of them. I have heard this argument in person.
I think there is a very narrow space where you need the resources that this provides and it's not yet more cost effective to have your own team of admins. At a certain headcount a the number admins don't matter that much anymore.
SkiFire13 3 hours ago [-]
> Your engineers who all have to possess AWS or similar certs
If you're using managed services that are so complex you need certified people then you're doing it wrong
mulmen 6 hours ago [-]
What you’re describing is outsourcing. It’s still possible with on-prem or cloud VMs. You just hire a contractor provide those services.
BadBadJellyBean 4 hours ago [-]
You are correct but I don't know about the cost structure. Also you have to somehow verify that they do a good job. You sometimes only see bad work when something goes wrong. Also you have to first find a company that provides the service.
The cloud makes it simple. They offer you managed service X. They hire experts for service x and you pay a part of the cost on top of your infra cost. No searching. No vetting. You just use the service.
I see the why this might be attractive. It isn't to me. But the pencil pushers like it.
actionfromafar 6 hours ago [-]
In my experience it doesn’t take long until you use such complex offerings from the cloud vendors, you need those ops engineers anyways. Just with slightly different skillsets.
BadBadJellyBean 4 hours ago [-]
I'd say you need people with certain skill sets anyways but at a certain scale you have to get specialized people for some service. Database admins, kubernetes admins, network admins. At a small scale that can be one or two people. But if you want 24/7 with a bigger scale you need multiple people for each role. You have to find them, pay them, schedule their absences.
To some management types it looks like a good deal to not deal with that and just let Amazon/Microsoft/Google/etc. deal with finding people to support the service and just pay a bit extra to the infra cost. Then you can only hire cloud infra admins. I don't think it works that way but that is what I have observed.
PaulKeeble 6 hours ago [-]
There was a period when development and system adminstrators were really concerned about vendor lock in and would choose on the basis of the ease of moving to a different platform, Java and J2EE was clearly based on this mindset. I have always found it odd people have been willing to adopt AWS with no apparent easy route off given its price.
pjmlp 6 hours ago [-]
Still is, nowadays the standard is Jakarta EE 11, alongside Microprofile, which Spring also uses parts of.
bell-cot 5 hours ago [-]
> I have always found it odd people have been willing to adopt AWS ...
It's the new "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM".
stuaxo 6 hours ago [-]
S3 has become a standard outside of AWS but everything else can be done with open tools except IAM which is always a pain anyway.
baq 7 hours ago [-]
s3 is kinda hard to replace if you actually use it; the rest is manageable with varying levels of pain
jmalicki 2 hours ago [-]
SQS is particularly hard, there are other options, but it has less direct competitors than S3
tt24 7 hours ago [-]
This is great, your suggestion to replace s3 and ddb is to run some VMs?
I don’t blame people for being skeptical
filleduchaos 6 hours ago [-]
Projects like Ceph and Minio have existed for years, though?
Beyond that, I just don't understand your point of view at all. Do people unironically think there is some super special dark magic being done in the bowels of Amazon, as opposed to just...code that runs on (virtual and physical) machines? The open source community yielded Linux but it's just sooo impossible for it to yield an object storage service? What a strangely shackled view of the world.
ApolloFortyNine 6 hours ago [-]
Yea, op just handwaved away all scalability. Guessing their response would be 'launch more vms'.
actionfromafar 6 hours ago [-]
Scalability is great, when you need it. Most companies don’t need it.
hermanzegerman 2 hours ago [-]
Why does the Dutch Central Bank need scalability?
rcbdev 3 hours ago [-]
This is great, your suggestion to replace our sovereignly hosted VMs is to run containers in the U.S.A.?
I don't blame people for being skeptical
tt24 3 hours ago [-]
When sovergienty comes at the expense of availability the latter will usually win over the former.
lelanthran 6 hours ago [-]
> This is great, your suggestion to replace s3 and ddb is to run some VMs?
Well... yes?
What do you think the AWS S3 and DDB is running on? Fairy dust?
tt24 5 hours ago [-]
No it’s using an army of extremely well paid engineers, something I guarantee the parent comment has no access to
lelanthran 5 hours ago [-]
> No it’s using an army of extremely well paid engineers, something I guarantee the parent comment has no access to
That's a different argument to the one I replied to, and the reply to "they have expensive infra people" is "you have to have expensive product-trained people to use them anyway".
tt24 5 hours ago [-]
It’s not really a different argument
The suggestion was to replace DBB and S3 with some VMs. Presumably those VMs would be managed by the engineers part of the parent commenter’s organization. They do not have access to as many engineers as AWS, nor do they pay them as well.
Not arguing about cost effectiveness here. Just pointing out how silly it is to suggest that you can replace DDB/S3 with some VMs ran by a midsize organization
RobRivera 5 hours ago [-]
That's genuinely my baseline, then I ask 'why do we want to manage this dependency?'
I can appreciate the desire to close gaps on expertise deficiency and make a vendor responsible, but the whole schtick of 'outsource everything and focus on your business for advantage' always rang to me as just an excuse to give our money to vendors.
Its almost as if the whole case for vertical integration is just taken as a wash
petterroea 6 hours ago [-]
For those who grew up with aws and other cloud providers this is the only reality they know of, after all.
kypro 7 hours ago [-]
This would only work if you have a solid devops team imo. AWS makes it extremely easy to deploy and scale infra.
Another advantage of AWS is permission management, automatic RDS snapshots, cloudwatch comes out of the box...
You can do everything with VMs, but in practise it's probably much harder.
holoduke 6 hours ago [-]
With opsAI using Claude it's becoming easier again.
nine_k 8 hours ago [-]
Most cloud VMs have network-attached storage working through a billing layer, and its IOPS numbers are pathetic. This makes running your own DB in a cloud VM much less reasonable. Now you can use local NVMe, but you still have to set up your own failover.
The original promise of the cloud is "you pay us less than you pay your sysadmins", which is not entirely unreasonable, especially at early stages.
Of course running on bare metal from Europe's own Hetzner is even more cost-efficient, if you already have a lot of sysadmin chops.
jbverschoor 7 hours ago [-]
Nah.. Amazon started with “ephimeral” compute. That was the whole thing why you needed another storage layer
Unlike most VPSes
junto 2 hours ago [-]
Lidl cloud is a resurgence in OpenStack?
I used to have quite a few customer hosted at Rackspace in the early 2010’s and I always thought it sad they dropped the ball when they got bought out by private investment and they fired most of the talent. I loved their API and the docs were really good.
tjwebbnorfolk 6 hours ago [-]
> will sign a major contract tomorrow
Ok so nothing has actually happened. These migrations are difficult and expensive, and often fail. It will be interesting to see an update in 5 years on how this went.
I'm sure the actual management interface is a separate thing but still, this website is unreal. Feels like a repurposed, half baked WordPress theme.
pier25 8 hours ago [-]
Wait... Lidl has a cloud service now?
kodama-lens 7 hours ago [-]
Yeah, kind of. Lidl and Kaufland is owned by the Schwarz Group. They have been busy replicating the AWS orgin story. Their cloud is called StackIT. I've worked with them. Still some room to grow but a solid foundation. I like that competition is back on
martijnvds 6 hours ago [-]
Is it fully custom, or are they using a flavor of OpenStack or similar?
MaKey 5 hours ago [-]
They have their own API but under the hood it's OpenStack.
storus 8 hours ago [-]
Schwarz seems to be obsessed with how Amazon (book seller) created AWS and they are trying to do the same... with 5 people. Also Aleph Alpha + Cohere is a Lidl work as the current CEO of the former led Lidl digital division.
wasmitnetzen 5 hours ago [-]
Lidl famously blew 500M on a failed SAP project, so they're understandably a bit into running things themselves.
But they had the guts to back away. Not everyone does.
scandox 8 hours ago [-]
So the 7,500 they say they're employing...is not true?
ivan_gammel 7 hours ago [-]
Schwarz Gruppe includes Schwarz Digits, which include StackIT. 7500 is the number of employees at Digits, which also includes online marketplaces like Kaufland e-commerce, so definitely not all of them work on the sovereign cloud.
ambicapter 8 hours ago [-]
Lidl is a grocery store chain, I'm assuming GP was talking about the amount of people actually working on the cloud.
scandox 7 hours ago [-]
Lidl has 375,000 employees. They have stated they employ 7,500 people in their digital services division.
7 hours ago [-]
avra 7 hours ago [-]
Yeah, Lidl and Kaufland are store chains, with 14200 stores combined.
7500 employees is just Schwarz Digits, the digital services division.
Yes I guess banks don’t mind the high prices of Lidl’s cloud.
It’s very much not a discount cloud provider. They are costly unlike their physical discount grocery stores.
Havoc 5 hours ago [-]
Pretty sure it's the oracle model - the advertised prices don't matter because it's all custom negotiated.
dethos 5 hours ago [-]
Makes sense. I never worked with this particular provider, but I must say that for many (many) use cases, Europe has very capable providers, and the big US players are not necessarily the best choices.
petervandijck 5 hours ago [-]
I just love that it’s Lidl, of all brands
k__ 5 hours ago [-]
European central bank will probably go for Aldi.
retired 4 hours ago [-]
Aldi Nord or Aldi Süd?
tacker2000 3 hours ago [-]
Hofer
retired 2 hours ago [-]
Trader Joe cloud.
sourcecodeplz 6 hours ago [-]
Isn't this how AWS also started? They built internal devops tools for them that were so good and expandable that they decided to give others access to them.
Havoc 5 hours ago [-]
Yeah, though in this case the selling point is less about scale and more about data sovereignty. German companies are pretty touchy about storing data cross borders
tomschwiha 7 hours ago [-]
The title is heavy clickbait. To say I just bought a Porsche when it was actually a Volkswagen is also wrong. Just because they belong to the same owner doesn't make it the same brand.
croes 6 hours ago [-]
It’s actually the other way around.
Porsche is a Volkswagen but a Volkswagen isn’t necessarily a Porsche.
VW bought Porsche
AndroTux 6 hours ago [-]
Yes, that's what they're saying. LIDL doesn't have a cloud. The Schwarz Group does.
fodkodrasz 5 hours ago [-]
Too bad, a LIDL branded cloud would be something really well marketable. Cloudside services (a'la Parkside)... or something along these lines.
retired 4 hours ago [-]
Imagine spinning up a Silvercrest instance for a database. Using W5 to distribute messages across the cloud. Using Parkside for object storage.
manquer 6 hours ago [-]
Kinda, VW indeed owns Porche AG 100% today.
However it was more complicated than that. Porche owned 50+% of Volkswagen at the time of Volkswagen buying them. Porche got over extended and leveraged buying Volkswagen . The management family is closely connected since the start and at the time in early 2010s 20% government ownership rule was just getting stuck down by European courts .
ck45 5 hours ago [-]
Well, it's more difficult. The original Volkswagen was designed by Ferdinand Porsche.
MiinusMiinus 6 hours ago [-]
I'm so happy that companies are ditching the big tech. Not enough fast enough imo.
holoduke 6 hours ago [-]
And Germany is better? It's government is almost a copy of the 10 commandments of war propoganda. I don't know but it seems to be a dangerous place to put your stuff.
strangegecko 5 hours ago [-]
Expand?
German government is certainly slow and overly limited by bureaucracy, but dangerous?
Who are you comparing to?
hermanzegerman 2 hours ago [-]
That's funny coming from an American.
Throwing Stones in a Glasshouse
vrganj 5 hours ago [-]
The last war Germany started famously ended 80 years ago.
The last war the US started is still ongoing and was started by them a few weeks ago.
holoduke 4 hours ago [-]
You really compare 40s Germany with the US? Nah
vrganj 4 hours ago [-]
I am comparing when the respective states last started wars to point out the absurdity of calling modern-day Germany warmongers.
holoduke 3 hours ago [-]
They are warmongers. Their tone currently is war. They are investing in war. They are becoming a war nation again.
vrganj 3 hours ago [-]
Again, they haven't started a war in 80 years. It sure seems like a more peaceful bet than the US, which started one like a month ago.
hermanzegerman 2 hours ago [-]
The US is also disappearing people without due process by agents without uniform hiding their faces and using unmarked vehicles.
This guy is really tone deaf when he tries to paint current Germany as worse than the US right now
tjwebbnorfolk 6 hours ago [-]
> will sign a major contract tomorrow
Ok so nothing has actually happened. It's also not specified whether this is in addition to their AWS footprint, or if it's a migration. It will be interesting to see an update in 5 years on how this goes.
andrewstuart 4 hours ago [-]
They should run their own data center.
Companies should have native capability to work computers, especially those whose business is pure information, like banks.
close04 6 hours ago [-]
The missing background piece is that the European Commission awarded a 180m EUR sovereign cloud contract to 4 European providers [0]. This framework agreement made the choice of national banks a lot more straight forward.
Getting a large customer is a great win for them, but setting up a cloud service isn't that hard? The most complicated bit would have been financing.
ivan_gammel 7 hours ago [-]
Lidl doesn‘t do that. It is just a grocery discounter, one company of the many in that corporate structure, and one of the users of that cloud.
joaodlf 8 hours ago [-]
Not necessarily trading blows, but LIDL is huge in all sorts of figures. From revenue to employment numbers.
Barrin92 7 hours ago [-]
the parent company (Schwarz Group) has over half a million employees and makes something like 200 billion in revenue per year, I think calling it a discount grocer is underselling it a bit lol.
hermanzegerman 1 hours ago [-]
It's their main business
guywithahat 8 hours ago [-]
> DNB Director Steven Maijoor announced last October that he intended to “set a good example” and switch to a European cloud, though he acknowledged that it “is not yet as robust or high-quality as the one from the U.S.”
> Last year, the Dutch Central Bank (DNB) and the Netherlands Authority for the Financial Markets (AFM) warned that the Dutch financial sector had become too dependent on foreign IT service providers
I wonder how much if this is a personal choice, and how much is pressure from the government. Banks are famously the first target of politicians, and it's common in China for exec's to publicly choose a national option under pressure from the CPP.
wolfi1 8 hours ago [-]
Lidl is German, so, not fully national, IMHO
graemep 7 hours ago [-]
If they cannot provide it nationally, Germany seems a good place to have it, especially as they are both EU.
At the very least a country dependent cloud services from multiple other countries is less dependent on any one of them than a country predominantly dependent on one (and most of Europe is currently dependent on US cloud providers).
8 hours ago [-]
Muromec 5 hours ago [-]
If the DNB says getting our clown computers from Americans is an operational risk, we believe it's an operational risk. Political or not.
tgv 5 hours ago [-]
AFAIK, the central bank is independent.
expedition32 4 hours ago [-]
For Dutch people money supercedes politics, religion and human life itself.
sammy2255 6 hours ago [-]
LIDL servers LuL
Grappelli 6 hours ago [-]
[dead]
semiquaver 6 hours ago [-]
Aldi has a cloud? Do you have to put a quarter in when you log into the console that you get back when you log out?
actionfromafar 6 hours ago [-]
Amazon has a cloud? Do you have to buy a book when you log in?
MaKey 5 hours ago [-]
I've got experience with the LIDL cloud aka STACKIT and work for a STACKIT partner. Just drop me a message if you are interested. Two fun solutions implemented (fully automated via Terraform):
Site-to-Site VPN between STACKIT and Azure using a LibreSwan VM and an Azure VPN Gateway
FortiGate HA cluster in STACKIT - not a single ICMP packet got lost during failover
People looked at me like they saw water burning but that would have made the dependency on the US a lot easier to sever. Just move the VM's.
To me it's like anything else in engineering, are the costs, risks, and benefits fully understood, and worth the tradeoff in the particular context.
I worked for a startup doing internet of things, the consumer would buy a device and get lifetime service baked in. And that company was a step further, just renting space in a colo was incredibly cost efficient, which supported the sales model and competitive landscape of that product. But it was also very costly to attention, one of the most valuable resources. But it can also get costly in non-intuitive ways, an example that comes to mind is we started to get interviews where a generation of candidates no longer had experience with metal, it was a foreign world to them.
With more experience, I find it's really the costs that get severely underestimated, both for and against the suggestion.
At some point, you have people (on here and elsewhere) questioning what all these people in an organization do. PART of the answer is that they're doing internal work that could have been outsourced in various ways.
The machine is a beast and I can serve a lot of users with it. In fact, and quite funnily, I already serve much more users with it than a lot of my older clients do with their software running on expensive k8s setup because „scale“ :-)
And last, but not least, I had a lot of fun building it. Its just nice to hear that thing humming away in the corner.
Honestly even if you have a single server, running k8s (or maybe Docker Compose for really simple cases) on it is still the simplest way to manage it (assuming you have more than 1 service, anyway). One configuration file format, one CLI tool, zero special paths to memorize, no filesystem permissions to configure, pretty good security out of the box, access to a whole bunch of helm charts and operators (for example, cert-manager, external-dns, prometheus, alert-manager, some logging operator for centralized logging with a decent UI and search, and a postgres operator for backups / replication / failover), etc.
We can go with your idea, sure: a few months in, an Account Manager from the cloud provider shows up and says your bill could be reduced by 50% if you just adopt some changes, using their custom, super optimized tools (“minor changes” will be the mantra).
And now you have your own company looking back to you on how can they get those savings, people who don’t understand what a VM is and cannot differentiate salesforce from an elastic container, as everything is “cloud”, but heard “50% off”.
Further, it needs people in decision making roles who understand and value the strategic differences between having an infrastructure concept that is trapped in one provider's proprietary software tooling ecosystem (aws, azure, etc), vs things built on open standards that are portable.
Most CTOs (and increasingly M2s and M3s) I've met are what I call "box architects". You know the ones who love drawing boxes, moving one box inside another box, drawing a line between 2 boxes or changing a unidirectional arrow into a bidirectional one, then declaring the hard part is done and now we need any random engineer to implement that or "Is there an AWS service that does that? I just don't see the value in us doing it in house".
A "super optimized tools" is just a box that you swap for another box and the "minor changes" will be just a couple of arrows than need to change or another box to swap for another box. You get them to feel good about doing architect stuff plus the 10x reduction in the bill. They can always replace that box with another box later after all.
And the reality is eventually you'll get a clueless one, and everything will revert to the mean.
And the mean is heavily influenced by marketing propaganda.
If a car salesman told me I could save 50% of my fuel bill from driving their special car a certain way I'd laugh at them.
2016 - lets use EC2, its just VM, we can move off
2018 - I see you are hosting your own PostgreSQL in EC2, you can use our managed solution
2020 - you are already using 18 our services (note, at this point you might still be using non-vendor products, like VMs, managed DB, and so on), why not use our IAM instead of rolling out your own auth.
2024 - you are now deeply locked, lets add more lock-in, why don't you use this tool to optimize your costs (welcome DynamoDB)
At this point, no one would ever question next tool from salesman. Because engineers see that company doesnt have strategy to move to another cloud, why should they reject this new tool?
also consider the people who are involved, a lot of times after 2 years you have totally new people in your team, they won't have context and constraints you had in the past when deciding to buy "just VM", they see it as "we already use AWS"
I would do a calculation based on their public price plan and come up with a 5-10x price compared to the bare metal OVH solution that perfectly fit our use case. I would then ask the sales team where I made a mistake in my calculation and hear nothing back.
A few months later, they would come back with the same pitch and the whole process would repeat...
I have a very hard time believing this, especially with fuel economy and emission regulations
It is true that fuel economy regulations make it much less practical to deliver gas guzzlers out of pure laziness. (As you may know, the Corolla GR is by far the most expensive of these options, because it's designed to achieve horsepower over mileage.)
People who know the tech, no
Non-technical middle management types, yes. It produces revenue when done aggressively enough, google "solarwinds sales people" for many anecdotal examples of extreme persistence. Not that I agree with it.
Your engineers who all have to possess AWS or similar certs before you hire them, work for free?
A move off VPS to managed services doesn't reduce your headcount or labour costs.
I think there is a very narrow space where you need the resources that this provides and it's not yet more cost effective to have your own team of admins. At a certain headcount a the number admins don't matter that much anymore.
If you're using managed services that are so complex you need certified people then you're doing it wrong
The cloud makes it simple. They offer you managed service X. They hire experts for service x and you pay a part of the cost on top of your infra cost. No searching. No vetting. You just use the service.
I see the why this might be attractive. It isn't to me. But the pencil pushers like it.
To some management types it looks like a good deal to not deal with that and just let Amazon/Microsoft/Google/etc. deal with finding people to support the service and just pay a bit extra to the infra cost. Then you can only hire cloud infra admins. I don't think it works that way but that is what I have observed.
It's the new "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM".
I don’t blame people for being skeptical
Beyond that, I just don't understand your point of view at all. Do people unironically think there is some super special dark magic being done in the bowels of Amazon, as opposed to just...code that runs on (virtual and physical) machines? The open source community yielded Linux but it's just sooo impossible for it to yield an object storage service? What a strangely shackled view of the world.
I don't blame people for being skeptical
Well... yes?
What do you think the AWS S3 and DDB is running on? Fairy dust?
That's a different argument to the one I replied to, and the reply to "they have expensive infra people" is "you have to have expensive product-trained people to use them anyway".
The suggestion was to replace DBB and S3 with some VMs. Presumably those VMs would be managed by the engineers part of the parent commenter’s organization. They do not have access to as many engineers as AWS, nor do they pay them as well.
Not arguing about cost effectiveness here. Just pointing out how silly it is to suggest that you can replace DDB/S3 with some VMs ran by a midsize organization
I can appreciate the desire to close gaps on expertise deficiency and make a vendor responsible, but the whole schtick of 'outsource everything and focus on your business for advantage' always rang to me as just an excuse to give our money to vendors.
Its almost as if the whole case for vertical integration is just taken as a wash
Another advantage of AWS is permission management, automatic RDS snapshots, cloudwatch comes out of the box...
You can do everything with VMs, but in practise it's probably much harder.
The original promise of the cloud is "you pay us less than you pay your sysadmins", which is not entirely unreasonable, especially at early stages.
Of course running on bare metal from Europe's own Hetzner is even more cost-efficient, if you already have a lot of sysadmin chops.
Unlike most VPSes
I used to have quite a few customer hosted at Rackspace in the early 2010’s and I always thought it sad they dropped the ball when they got bought out by private investment and they fired most of the talent. I loved their API and the docs were really good.
Ok so nothing has actually happened. These migrations are difficult and expensive, and often fail. It will be interesting to see an update in 5 years on how this went.
https://stackit.com/en
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17541092
Yes, when you pay you have to print a receipt with QR code, and then have to scan it to log out.
https://accounts.stackit.cloud/ui/login/user
It’s very much not a discount cloud provider. They are costly unlike their physical discount grocery stores.
VW bought Porsche
However it was more complicated than that. Porche owned 50+% of Volkswagen at the time of Volkswagen buying them. Porche got over extended and leveraged buying Volkswagen . The management family is closely connected since the start and at the time in early 2010s 20% government ownership rule was just getting stuck down by European courts .
German government is certainly slow and overly limited by bureaucracy, but dangerous?
Who are you comparing to?
Throwing Stones in a Glasshouse
The last war the US started is still ongoing and was started by them a few weeks ago.
This guy is really tone deaf when he tries to paint current Germany as worse than the US right now
Ok so nothing has actually happened. It's also not specified whether this is in addition to their AWS footprint, or if it's a migration. It will be interesting to see an update in 5 years on how this goes.
Companies should have native capability to work computers, especially those whose business is pure information, like banks.
[0] https://commission.europa.eu/news-and-media/news/commission-...
> Last year, the Dutch Central Bank (DNB) and the Netherlands Authority for the Financial Markets (AFM) warned that the Dutch financial sector had become too dependent on foreign IT service providers
I wonder how much if this is a personal choice, and how much is pressure from the government. Banks are famously the first target of politicians, and it's common in China for exec's to publicly choose a national option under pressure from the CPP.
At the very least a country dependent cloud services from multiple other countries is less dependent on any one of them than a country predominantly dependent on one (and most of Europe is currently dependent on US cloud providers).
Site-to-Site VPN between STACKIT and Azure using a LibreSwan VM and an Azure VPN Gateway
FortiGate HA cluster in STACKIT - not a single ICMP packet got lost during failover