I've been getting serious, recently, about moving all my workloads to equipment that I control in datacenters with which I have professional relationships. It's less expensive, easier, and this kind of nonsense doesn't happen. These cloud providers need to step back and observe how terrible they've made these products. Footguns everywhere, pricing that is impossible to forecast or reason about, broken APIs, and automated self destruction. Then you have third-party providers sitting on top of them, adding another layer of each antifeature. Crazy.

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lacewing 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> These cloud providers need to step back and observe how terrible they've made these products.

They don't, because the allure of effortless scaling is hard to resist: everyone thinks of themselves as the next tech unicorn. And if you actually become an unicorn, you're already too dependent on AWS / Azure / GCP to easily move somewhere else. At best, your strategy is to become "multi-cloud".

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ibejoeb 6 hours ago | parent [-]

That effortlessness is a fantasy. That's illustrated right here in this write-up by how complicated their system is.

>Railway’s network is a mesh ring, built up of high availability fiber interconnects between Metal <> GCP <> AWS. However, in this ring, there was still a hard dependency on workload discoverability being tied to the network control plane API that was hosted on the machines running in Google Cloud

What the hell is even that?

	▲	foobar1726 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		"We had all of our workers set up in an open office layout to to make sure everyone could talk to each other without a single point of failure. But last night the boss got too drunk and didn't come in, so everyone spent the day scrolling tiktok."

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Scaled 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's really surprising how much cheaper colo becomes if you have an even vaguely predictable workload. And you don't have to be a major customer, either -- the data centers will happily sell you single U's or a couple U's, even on a monthly basis if you ask, making it perfectly viable for startups or advanced personal projects.

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mxuribe 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> ...These cloud providers need to step back and observe how terrible they've made these products...

I doubt that will happen because none of them want to stop the money-making machine they have! And, if your thought after my comment is that all us techies are making a fuss, so the cloud providers and businesses using them will hear our cries and trigger a backlash...? I doubt that to...because some senior business leaders that i see are bent on listening more to management consultants as opposed to abalance of folks including their own internal experts...but, alas, maybe i'm just having too cynical a day today. :-)

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bombcar 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The thing that's nice about physical datacenters with people is that they often have to physically walk over to disconnect you - it's not as easy as some automated system doing an AI.

	▲	Scaled 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		And if they do, you can walk over there too and ask a human why in person. (Or just call the NOC)