Comment by Nextgrid
18 hours ago
Availability ain't worth shit unless the compensation for missing said availability is anywhere near the business losses caused by it. "Credit on your bill" doesn't count (and you're not even likely to get that since they can just lie on their status page and pretend everything is fine).
Cloud is convenient but don't expect any kind of availability you can actually rely on. If you actually need that, you're gonna have to go multi-cloud or self-managed bare-metal at multiple providers anyway.
You go multi-region. Multi-cloud is extremely expensive, both in terms of data and functional equivalence.
Bare metal is pretty much the same story: you can host it at different providers, but scaling that and maintaining coherence between data centers is not an easy feat as it might sound.
And seriously now, no sane provider is willing to cover your losses if they go do down. On the other hand, it's not a secret this is not happening and you can take this into account in your risk management strategy.
After years and years, Amazon now has an offering to shield you from when us-east-1 goes down. Funny, no?
If you’re going to go multi-region and take the latency hit may as well go multi-provider no?
Multi-region within the same provider won’t shield you against unknown shared dependencies on a single point of failure (AWS console auth still relies on credentials being checked in a single region if I remember right).
And yes fully agreed that maintaining consistency between active-active regions (whether cloud or bare-metal) is super hard and not worth it for most deployments. Active-standby with point-in-time-recovery and an acceptable data loss window is much easier - when one region is confirmed down, someone throws a switch and the standby becomes active.
> no sane provider is willing to cover your losses
Agreed, but thats why all those who justify the 10-90x premium of the cloud over bare-metal are full of it - that premium is not actually worth it.
> it's not a secret this is not happening
Maybe for you it’s not a secret? Literally every thread tries to justify cloud reliability and their resulting markups. Well if it’s that reliable they’d put their money where their mouth is.
> If you’re going to go multi-region and take the latency hit may as well go multi-provider no?
No. If you go multi-region, you use the same tooling, same terraform modules and logic and so on. There's little plumbing needed to make it work. And latency wise this is not an issue in most cases, since most of the requests are covered by the CDN anyway. And you don't have to duplicate everything.
If you go multi-cloud you need to learn a whole new set of systems. And that is expensive. Both in terms of operating and people - because you will need more.
> Agreed, but thats why all those who justify the 10-90x premium of the cloud over bare-metal are full of it - that premium is not actually worth it.
You get charged a premium for convenience. And a high enough chance you don't have downtime.
> Maybe for you it’s not a secret? Literally every thread tries to justify cloud reliability and their resulting markups.
Cloud is reliable if you are willing to spend some money to benefit from that reliability and convenience.
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Besides this, another thing where cloud saves you money is compliance. They have all the right attestations in place to make your audits go easy. If you self-host on bare metal, you're going to spend a lot of time to be compliant with various regulations. Maybe if you're a small company, you don't have that much compliance you need to do. But once you grow a little, those immutable Stackdriver logs are a godsend when you're asked to prove logs have not been tampered with.