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Aside from the 'it's a cargo cult' discussion, when we start dissecting these technical merits we often miss the business angle of Accountability. This is e

Aside from the 'it's a cargo cult' discussion, when we start dissecting these technical merits we often miss the business angle of __Accountability__. This is exactly the reason why you see Fortune 500 companies paying millions to external consultants for what seem to be fairly trivial advisory/decision making tasks. If you are running something big enough and business critical enough and you roll your own custom _anything_, even if you save a gazillion, you are a hero for the next quarter. But if your custom solution goes fubar you are packing your boxes. The effort/time/cost of managing/configuring cloud anything is negligible if it allows people in companies where Software is a cost centre to deflect liability if something goes fubar. It's pretty much the revamped 21st century version of the 80's meme "nobody got fired for buying IBM". Nobody will get fired at big corp for going all in on Azure or AWS. Look at CrowdStrike's cluster fuck, there were zero heads rolled for using the cloud services impacted by it. The very opposite would be true if it happened on bare metal servers. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, carry a 'too big to go wrong' halo with them (at least in public discourse) and that just sells.

growse 2y ago
The flip side of this is control. If s3 goes down, and therefore your service is down, there's little you can do about it whilst your customers are screaming at you.
- api 2y ago
  Yes but you can blame S3. I think the OP had a major point. In large organizations the incentive is to have someone to blame that is not you.
  - growse 2y ago
    If I was paying a large amount of money for a service that was then down, and then the vendor just shrugged with "s3 is down, nothing I can do", I'd be re-tendering that very day.
    - api 2y ago
      It’s not about you the customer though. It’s about the internal politics in the company. If it’s self hosted and it breaks you are in an IT firefight. If it’s a cloud SaaS product and it breaks you can twiddle your thumbs and yell at someone else and credibly shirk responsibility.
      - growse 2y ago
        I get what you're saying, it's about incentives and the slopey-shoulderyness that characterises the "someone else's problem" culture. My point is that this is a bad culture for the company. There's no point playing internal politics and finger-pointing if your revenue is walking out the door.

Aside from the 'it's a cargo cult' discussion, when we start dissecting these technical merits we often miss the business angle of __Accountability__. This is e

growse 2y ago

The flip side of this is control. If s3 goes down, and therefore your service is down, there's little you can do about it whilst your customers are screaming at you.

api 2y ago
Yes but you can blame S3. I think the OP had a major point. In large organizations the incentive is to have someone to blame that is not you.
- growse 2y ago
  If I was paying a large amount of money for a service that was then down, and then the vendor just shrugged with "s3 is down, nothing I can do", I'd be re-tendering that very day.
  - api 2y ago
    It’s not about you the customer though. It’s about the internal politics in the company. If it’s self hosted and it breaks you are in an IT firefight. If it’s a cloud SaaS product and it breaks you can twiddle your thumbs and yell at someone else and credibly shirk responsibility.
    - growse 2y ago
      I get what you're saying, it's about incentives and the slopey-shoulderyness that characterises the "someone else's problem" culture. My point is that this is a bad culture for the company. There's no point playing internal politics and finger-pointing if your revenue is walking out the door.