AWS hearts multi-cloud? It's gonna happen

https://cloudirregular.substack.com/p/aws-hearts-multi-cloud-its-gonna

by ablekh • 6 years ago

78 34 6 years ago

cloudirregular.substack.com

astatine• 6 years ago

Sounds about right. We have 95% of our infra on AWS but then early this year one team needed something specific from GCP and started using that. A few months ago, a client insisted on having their services delivered from Azure as they have a lot of other related services already tied into Azure. 95% on AWS and the other two add up to just 5% - but, hey, multi-cloud!

_vufv• 6 years ago

I have no faith in AWS executing on this successfully. I'd imagine an offering like the suggested one would have some kind of: a) UI to inspect the state of other clouds, b) provisioning capability that allows creation of resources in other clouds.

On the UI front:

- AWS UI toolkit has aged by this point and each day it feels more dated

- CloudFormation, as their main cloud management UI is particularly bad (e.g. limited info on what caused a problem, not displaying ARNs of resources belonging to a stack systematically etc.)

On the provisioning front:

- Terraform and Pulumi are so much better than anything AWS offers, and that says something because even these tools are not great.

ablekh4• 6 years ago

I agree with you on Terraform and Pulumi (I'm especially excited about the latter, due to extra benefits over Terraform). However, I think that you are missing the main point / theme of the post - it is not specifically about AWS' approach to multi-cloud, but rather about general dynamics of the multi-cloud trend.

chucky_z2• 6 years ago

Check out Terraform CDK for a thing that is native to TF, allows real code, and is progressing real fast

the_duke• 6 years ago

Do you have practical experience with Pulumi in large deploymenets? Is it bug free and dependable?

I would like to try it out as a Terraform replacement, but but the popularity and corresponding module availability and maturity is hard to match.

matharmin• 6 years ago

My team has a lot of practical experience with Pulumi, after using custom bash scripts, manually-managing AWS config, some Terraform and CloudFormation in the past. We use it for dozens of services on Kubernetes and AWS.

While we did have to write some of our own tooling to reduce the boilerplate over different services, Pulumi has been by far the best tool we've found to do the deployments. Being able to automatically provision a resource in AWS, then use results from that in a Kubernetes service (env var) in the same deployment, is not something I ever expected to be able to automate.

We haven't had any issues with module availability (I think it uses/adapts Terraform modules to a large extent). The config as code feels way more approachable and reusable than any other tool I've seen.

I've never had any production issues because of Pulumi. It also allows you to preview changes before applying them, giving a nice confidence boost in the changes.

cmclaughlin• 6 years ago

I ran into bugs with Pulumi. But I’ve really been enjoying CDK for Terraform - check it out:

https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform-cdk

For those that don’t follow this space very closely - this allows yiu to model infrastructure in your favorite programming language, such as Python.

oblio• 6 years ago

- AWS UI toolkit has aged by this point and each day it feels more dated

They're rewriting the console: https://abduzeedo.com/amazon-web-services-design-system

At least a few of their services have already been updated.

QuinnyPig• 6 years ago

Can they get a working and well designed management tool for their own cloud first?

ablekh4• 6 years ago

:-)

hinkley• 6 years ago

That ship has sailed, don’t you think?

Lead, follow, or get out of the way. The next stop on that continuum is, I believe, “great artists steal.”

ignoramous3• 6 years ago

This article is not far off in its prediction that AWS would support multi-cloud natively eventually if that's what the market demands (See also: AWS Marketplace). We are very early in our journey and are multi-cloud already and because we're bootstrapped, cost ultimately decides what we use. And no, I don't mean multi-cloud in a way Netflix does it, but in a way where different parts of our system are hosted wholly by different cloud providers. So, in a sense, everything supports multi-cloud already anyways?

QLDB is a recent entry to the canon. It’s easy to spot these "AWS-native" services because they’re often dogfooded by Amazon retail.

Well, in some cases, it is dog-fooded by AWS themselves. In QLDB's case, the underlying tech was built for EC2 [0] whilst Kinesis Data Streams was built by the Billing team at AWS [1].

[0] https://twitter.com/colmmacc/status/1067832198059970561

[1] https://gigaom.com/2014/03/20/why-amazon-built-its-data-stre...

tpetry• 6 years ago

How do you keep the costs down with egress pricing? If the parts of your applications are distributed through cloud providers you all the time are exporting data to egress. Thats not a cheap concept or did you build your software with this in mind?

ignoramous3• 6 years ago

How do you keep the costs down with egress pricing?

The AWS components we use are mostly ingress heavy. Egress heavy components are on Cloudflare, Scaleway, and Digital Ocean.

...did you build your software with this in mind?

Yep, we designed the system keeping egress costs in-mind, and that meant some of things were a bit more time-consuming (build vs buy) than they normally would have been.

That said, we aren't what you'd call an uber sophisticated upstart using cutting edge tech. Right now, whatever systems we have are all mostly boringly simple and probably won't scale.

dilyevsky• 6 years ago

If you have enough volume you can pay for partner interconnect that lower price per GB to 2c so that’s not great but not terrible either.

Edit: You probably would want it for performance first though

user5994461• 6 years ago

Run the database in multiple regions and pay the egress for replication.

egress cost is really not as bad as people expect. if you're willing to pay for double the instances and storage, as required to run in multiple regions/clouds, the bandwidth costs are really not that outstanding in the grand scheme of things.

The usual problem is poor architecture and non-distributed systems. You're not going multi region when everything relies on a single MySQL instance somewhere.

beagle3• 6 years ago

IIRC, CloudEndure offered migration between different clouds before Amazon bought them - though now they seem to support migration into Amazon only (not surprising).

This never supported a "multi cloud" solution in the sense that things are running on two clouds simultaneously, but it did let you fail-over to a different cloud. Now it only lets you fail-over to Amazon if I read the docs correctly.

ciguy• 6 years ago

Until the various clouds stop charging outrageous amounts for bandwidth egress multi-cloud will remain a niche.

forrestbrazeal• 6 years ago

...And 8 hours after I wrote this piece, AWS announces their public container registry. [0]

Is that the "multi-cloud management tool" The Information heard about? Not exactly how I would have characterized it...

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/containers/advice-for-customers...

redwood2• 6 years ago

Almost certainly not. They do many things in parallel

redwood2• 6 years ago

Response to Anthos I suppose.

Speaking of which, has anyone ever seen a company use Anthos? (Software so seems a lower lift)

Anyone seen a company use AWS Outposts? (Hardware so seems hard to imagine anyone actually using but I'd love to be proved wrong).

I'm thinking AWS may realize the hardware model of Outposts is prohibitive so may target a software solution.

halfer53• 6 years ago

lots of public sector customer is using outpost for data sovereignty

andaman• 6 years ago

What do yall think about VMware on AWS? Looks like a neat solution to “polycloud”.

luma• 6 years ago

This feels like trading one set of single-vendor lock-in concerns for another.

wiremine• 6 years ago

This sort of feels like Microsoft embracing Linux. First they fought it, but the market forces were too strong. Eventually MS figured out how to coexist with Linux, and leverage it for their business.

Ultimately, lock-in in the cloud is a real issue for companies, and the open source community will figure out how to address this issue. AWS and other platforms will fight this a bit, but ultimately they'll adopt whatever approach emerges.

This isn't too say all cloud-services will be commoditized, but the interop between similar services will be.

Saar1991• 6 years ago

I believe theres still a whole bunch of useful "multicloud" products out there. For instance if you have services in different clouds that talk to each other, having a performance monitoring software that gets data from both and stitches it together is useful.

utahcon• 6 years ago

AWS has been very chummy with HashiCorp and Terraform in the last few years, going so far as to announce a Landing Zone collaboration with them

https://www.hashicorp.com/resources/aws-terraform-landing-zo...

and of course the https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform-cdk

I am not sure what I would think of an offering from one cloud provider to support another cloud provider, just seems shady as hell. I could see AWS spinning out an MSP that would handle multi-cloud stuff, because AWS MSP would be "cloud experts", but that might be a stretch too, TBH.

I really see them taking Terraform, and the CDK, and pushing that as their multi-cloud if they were to really lean into that, but there is little to no reward (as I see it) for them doing such a thing. It would just be another tool that will gather dust in a few months while they venture off to exploit another Open Source project in their MSP Cloud providings

AWS hearts multi-cloud? It's gonna happen

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