Comment by vidarh
17 hours ago
I do consulting in this space, and I'm torn: I make much more money managing infrastructure from clients who insist on AWS. But it's much more enjoyable to work with people who knows how to keep it simple.
17 hours ago
I do consulting in this space, and I'm torn: I make much more money managing infrastructure from clients who insist on AWS. But it's much more enjoyable to work with people who knows how to keep it simple.
I worked on a project for my company (a low volume basic web app) and I suggested we could just start the whole thing on one server. They brought on some Azure consultants and the project ballooned out to months of work and all kinds of services. I’m convinced most of the consultants were just piling on services so they could make more money.
If you hire hammer experts then you're going to end up using a lot of hammers in your construction. The Azure experts aren't pitching Azure because they're trying to sell more Azure products. They do it because that's all they know and most likely because you don't know it so you'll be likely to come back to them for support when things inevitably need to evolve.
Also, the more you use your cloud vendor's various services in your code, the more subject you are to vendor lock-in.
I won't name any names, but I'm pretty sure this is a big part of the reason why a specific cloud vendor pushed so very hard for us to push a bunch of data into their highly advanced NoSQL big data solution, when the data in question was perfectly happy continuing indefinitely to exist as a few tens of megabytes of CSV files that were growing at a rate of a couple kilobytes per day.
1 reply →
It's probably true. The biggest challenge with doing the right thing in this space is that the sales job is hard, time consuming and so expensive that it's a lot easier to make it profitable if you make projects balloon like that. The sales effort is much the same.
I've been offering to help people cut costs for a while, and it's a shockingly hard sell even with offers of guarantees, so we're deemphasizing it to focus more on selling more complex DevOps assistance and AI advice instead... Got to eat (well, I do much better than that, but anyway), but I refuse to over engineer things just to make more money.
I don't necessarily even blame the contractors. When the bosses look askance at simple solutions what can you do? It's weirdly harder to sell people on something simple than on something complex. They assume the simple solution must be missing something important.
I joke with my boss that all our shit ends up running on a single server in some Amazon data center. It's probably not true but if you add up everything we do it's pretty close to one big server.
It's probably not true, but the end result would be the same even if it was true.
What I’ve always found concerning about managed cases is that the “platform” teams could never explain, in simple terms, how the application was actually deployed.
It was so complex I gave up after a while. That’s never a good sign.