I say this as someone who only uses AWS for DR backups: hosting infra is one of the most competitive industries out there. Major cloud costs are exorbitant but that should be interpreted as proof of a great product. I shudder at paying 9c/gb egress but apparently many others do not.
> hosting infra is one of the most competitive industries out there.
Here is an experiment - tell your employer you will be hosting on (insert no-name provider here), to same a literal million dollars, and see if you can get security team to sign off on it.
Here is another experiment - reach out to he security team, and tell them AWS costs are too high, ask them which providers they will be ready and willing to sign off. My guess is it will not be a big list beyond AWS/Azure/GCP.
So the market is not competitive at all, most of us cannot switch providers even if the alternative would be 100x better.
PS: I am not saying security team are assholes, I am pointing out a major barrier to competition.
The magic of cloud is how quickly you can scale things up. If you're a new fast growing business it will give you a competitive edge.
If you drank to cloud kool-aid from the beginning you kind of get used to huge costs for simple services so it's easier for your brain to justify paying 10k a month for a simple web app deployed in kubernetes, using cosmos db and any other number of services.
I've seen many companies that started on the cloud and their core architecture is so interleaved with the cloud that it would a huge investment to reduce that dependency and switch.
Same. I use Hetzner and DigitalOcean for my own stuff, and shudder at AWS costs. At the same time both my current and previous employers use AWS and it's fine for their user because revenue is (very) high relative to the cloud resource usage, and that is a situation where cloud usage is fine. But so many - B2C in particular - businesses who uses cloud have tight enough margins that they're just setting themselves up for being disrupted by a competitor with tighter cost control.
Do people even understand what "free market" means? A free market is one with low or no barriers to entry for suppliers and perfect information available to consumers such that they can always make the optimal choice. How can anyone, especially on this site, think the cloud market is anywhere close to being free?
I think people are confused thinking free market means no regulation. No regulation leads to monopoly which is the furthest from a free market you can possibly get. People who seriously advocate for such things are ignorant fools. There are countless examples of how markets fail and that's why every major economy in the world has a government.
It depends on what you mean by free market, it's often used interchangeably with with laissez-faire capitalism but an important concept in a free market is that the barrier to entry for new competitors should be as low as realistically possible, so regulation that prevents vendor lock-in can be pro free market.
It makes sense with this being an American site, and most Americans think that Socialism is essentially the same thing as Communism (but then why define them as separate things?).
Community, Cooperative, Employee owned are all forms of socialism. None of them prevent competition.
> no market incentive to provide a decent service, nor to compensate workers fairly.
If you owned part of the company you worked for, you would be more likely to provide good service as that would then have repeat business and would directly financially impact you. The performance of the business is the only way you would get paid and as there are no shareholders the company would compensate rather than dividend.
Your comment makes absolutely no sense, socialism doesn't prevent free markets.
qeternity|2 years ago
ClumsyPilot|2 years ago
Here is an experiment - tell your employer you will be hosting on (insert no-name provider here), to same a literal million dollars, and see if you can get security team to sign off on it.
Here is another experiment - reach out to he security team, and tell them AWS costs are too high, ask them which providers they will be ready and willing to sign off. My guess is it will not be a big list beyond AWS/Azure/GCP.
So the market is not competitive at all, most of us cannot switch providers even if the alternative would be 100x better.
PS: I am not saying security team are assholes, I am pointing out a major barrier to competition.
cntainer|2 years ago
If you drank to cloud kool-aid from the beginning you kind of get used to huge costs for simple services so it's easier for your brain to justify paying 10k a month for a simple web app deployed in kubernetes, using cosmos db and any other number of services.
I've seen many companies that started on the cloud and their core architecture is so interleaved with the cloud that it would a huge investment to reduce that dependency and switch.
vidarh|2 years ago
hkt|2 years ago
Jochim|2 years ago
madaxe_again|2 years ago
This is the old unpopular Hayek/Friedman “classic liberal” position, that markets and industry should be heavily regulated and taxed.
globular-toast|2 years ago
I think people are confused thinking free market means no regulation. No regulation leads to monopoly which is the furthest from a free market you can possibly get. People who seriously advocate for such things are ignorant fools. There are countless examples of how markets fail and that's why every major economy in the world has a government.
stuaxo|2 years ago
rguillebert|2 years ago
cbeach|2 years ago
In socialism/communism all sectors become state monopolies, with no market incentive to provide a decent service, nor to compensate workers fairly.
happymellon|2 years ago
It makes sense with this being an American site, and most Americans think that Socialism is essentially the same thing as Communism (but then why define them as separate things?).
Community, Cooperative, Employee owned are all forms of socialism. None of them prevent competition.
> no market incentive to provide a decent service, nor to compensate workers fairly.
If you owned part of the company you worked for, you would be more likely to provide good service as that would then have repeat business and would directly financially impact you. The performance of the business is the only way you would get paid and as there are no shareholders the company would compensate rather than dividend.
Your comment makes absolutely no sense, socialism doesn't prevent free markets.
becquerel|2 years ago