The many lies about reducing complexity part 2: Cloud
This shared responsibility principle that underlies cloud marketing speak sounds a lot like the self-driving mess we find ourselves in today - I.e. the responsibility boundary between parties exists in a fog of war and results in more exceptions than if one or the other were totally responsible.<p>We have been a customer of Amazon AWS for ~6 years now, and we still really only use ~3 of their products: EC2, Route53 and S3. I.e. the actual compute&#x2F;memory&#x2F;storage&#x2F;network capacity, and the mapping of the outside world to it. Because we are a software company, we write most of our own software. There is no value to our customers in us stringing together a pile of someone else&#x27;s products, especially in a way that we cannot guarantee will be sustainable for &gt;5 years. We cannot afford to constantly rework completed product installations.<p>We strongly feel that any deeper buy-in with 3rd party technology vendors would compromise our agility and put us at their total mercy. Where we are currently positioned in the lock-in game, we could pull the ripcord and be sitting in a private datacenter within a week. All we need to do is move VMs, domain registrations and DNS nameservers if we want to kill the AWS bill.<p>I feel for those who are up to their eyeballs in cloud infrastructure. Perhaps you made your own bed, but you shouldn&#x27;t have to suffer in it. These are very complex decisions. We didn&#x27;t get it right at first either. Maybe consider pleading with your executive management for mercy now. Perhaps you get a shot at a complete redo before it all comes crashing down. We certainly did. It&#x27;s amazing what can happen if you have the guts to own up to bad choices and start an honest conversation.<p>I would also be interested to hear the other side of the coin. Who out there is using 20+ AWS&#x2F;Azure&#x2F;GCP products to back a single business app and is having a fantastic time of it?