So the whole thing is well worth a read IMO, and addresses a lot of the issues I have with cloud as the solution for everything.

My main point here is that individuals and organizations that require all the flexibility that cloud services offer are a (tiny) minority. This means that for the majority of us, all the complexity necessary to provide this flexibility ends up being purely a complication or worse, a liability.

There are absolutely companies who need the scaling. But it’s a fucking lot of overhead if you don’t.

Let’s repeat it one more time: complexity hides and creates security issues.

This is similar to all the LLM code stuff. If you don’t actually fully understand what your code does, bad stuff happens.

This premise has the consequence that Cloud systems are a big puzzle. The pieces of the puzzle are the Cloud products. Engineers working with Cloud systems essentially need to understand the abstraction but not necessarily the underlying, ultimate working mechanism of what those abstractions do. For example, a cloud expert might know everything about the difference between NACLs and Security Groups, all the details about how to configure them, their limitations etc., but the main idea is that such expert doesn’t need to know anything below that (e.g., how the traffic is filtered).

Ultimately my perspective, and I appreciate it’s a very personal one, is that building and working with the Cloud makes me feel like a glorified application administrator. My job becomes researching how the Cloud solved the problem that I need to solve, and compose the solution in the way the Cloud provider imagined it should be solved, rather than solving the problem

I was going to bring up basically this point:

because vendor-lock is not something that has only to do with infrastructure. It has also to do with the skills of the engineers involved. Cloud knowledge, for the most part, is not portable. You are a wizard of IAM policies in GCP? Good job, this is completely useless if you go to Azure. Oh, you are a guru of VPCs and private endpoints? Well done, this is completely useless if you move to a different cloud.

But you covered it pretty well. Abstractions are great. Proprietary abstractions that are more focused on how they can bill you than real, useful, functional categories? Not so much.

Despite the efforts means something which is ironic: many companies which run on Cloud, at some point, will have one or more teams whose main purpose is understanding how they are spending money in the Cloud and to reduce those costs. If this sounds conflicting with the idea of reducing personnel, well, it is. The digital infrastructure of my organization is not that huge. Give or take 2000 compute instances (some very small). Something that 200 servers could easily provide. Cloud bills are more than $15 millions/year. I checked a server builder for example, and an absolute beast (something like 2x Xeon platinum processor, 200TB of NVME disks, 1TB of RAM etc.) would still stay comfortably under $250k. 100 servers this powerful will probably be a multiple of our computing power, and cost almost a third if we consider a lifetime of 3 years, which is very low. A more realistic estimation of 5 years leads to a saving of ~$50 millions over 5 years. Completely insane! This is of course if you want to buy hardware. Powerful servers rented run you for $500-1000/month. Assuming a cost of $1000/month, my company could rent more than 1000 powerful servers, and still save money compared to Cloud costs, leaving plenty for additional services such as networking, storage, premium support (remote hands) or actual engineers salary

So there’s a level of rent seeking behind all the software moving to subscriptions, and them wanting to lock you in just like their service providers are doing to them. But I have to think the massive costs of cloud junk also pay a role in stuff like a calendar charging double digit annual fees for something that takes very little storage and very little computation (and you of course can’t just buy software any more).

I have no words for multi-cloud. Even like a Facebook or YouTube scale site, are you really going to double (or more for some reason?) your storage costs (plus whatever intercommunication between the two), just in case the provider goes down for a couple hours (which is extremely rare, and you won’t be the only site impacted, so people won’t really blame you for.) Plus that architecture sounds like the shitshow to end all shitshows.

Great post, a quick nitpick if you don’t mind, introduce or use an abbreviation’s full words before using its abbreviated form

Granted that the article is geared towards sysadmins and cloud developers, others who may want to read it may have a hard time doing so. As an example, reading through the first technical point, I saw “IAMs” and “Network ACL”, I don’t understand what those abbrs mean

The cloud is just someone else’s computer

I’m sorry, but this started like a recipe article and I lost all interest. I don’t care about your life story, I clicked the link to read your opinions, and you spent the first several paragraphs avoiding them.