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.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/memory/storage/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's products, especially in a way that we cannot guarantee will be sustainable for >5 years. We cannot afford to constantly rework completed product installations.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.I feel for those who are up to their eyeballs in cloud infrastructure. Perhaps you made your own bed, but you shouldn't have to suffer in it. These are very complex decisions. We didn'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's amazing what can happen if you have the guts to own up to bad choices and start an honest conversation.I would also be interested to hear the other side of the coin. Who out there is using 20+ AWS/Azure/GCP products to back a single business app and is having a fantastic time of it?