The Internet is supposed to be decentralized. The big three seem to have all the power now (Amazon, Microsoft, and Google) plus Cloudflare/Oracle.
How did we get here? Is it because of scale? Going to market in minutes by using someone else's computers instead of building out your own, like co-location or dedicated servers, like back in the day.
It still is very decentralized. We are discussing this via the internet right now.
I need to drop AWS and start passing data through encrypted HN posts.
Yeah, but MyChart is down.
When AWS was down we were talking about it here, now Azure is down and we're still talking about it here. Where does HN actually live?
big, if true
A lot of money and years of marketing the cloud as the responsible business decision led us here. Now that the cloud providers have vendor lock-in, few will leave, and customers will continue to wildly overpay for cloud services.
Ahh, but you forget what it used to be like. Sites used to go down all the time.
Now, they go down a lot less frequently, but when they do, it's more widespread.
Not sure how the current situation is better. Being stranded with no way whatsoever to access most/all of your services sounds way more terrifying than regular issues limited to a couple of services at a time
> no way whatsoever to access most/all of your services
I work on a product hosted on Azure. That's not the case. Except for front door, everything else is running fine. (Front door is a reverse proxy for static web sites.)
The product itself (an iot stormwater management system) is running, but our customers just can't access the website. If they need to do something, they can go out to the sites or call us and we can "rub two sticks together" and bypass the website. (We could also bypass front door if someone twisted our arms.)
Most customers only look at the website a few times a year.
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That being said, our biggest point of failure is a completely different iot vendor who you probably won't hear about on Hacker News when they, or their data networks, have downtime.
The portal was down for most of the day and accessing any resources from the portal once the portal was up was not possible.
You were able to manage everything through the command line the entire time.
Now I will admit I am more of a point-and-click person; but if I had to I could have figured out how to use the command line.
AND: A lot of shops use tools like Terraform / tofu, which means they manage their environments with scripts instead of point-and-click.
It’s the Heisenberg cloud principal.
From today [0].
> Big Tech lobbying is riding the EU’s deregulation wave by spending more, hiring more, and pushing more, according to a new report by NGO’s Corporate Europe Observatory and LobbyControl on Wednesday (29 October).
> Based on data from the EU’s transparency register, the NGOs found that tech companies spend the most on lobbying of any sector, spending €151m a year on lobbying — a 33 percent increase from €113m in 2023.
Gee whizz, I really do wonder how they end up having all the power!
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45744973
Thats the whole point, big players like AWS and MS can go down, but here we are still talking on the internet.
Decentralisation is winning it seems.
Not everyone has moved over, but I'm sure there have been thoughts or plans to.
> How did we get here?
I think the response lies in the surrounding ecosystem.
If you have a company it's easier to scale your team if you use AWS (or any other established ecosystem). It's way easier to hire 10 engineers that are competent with AWS tools than it is to hire 10 engineers that are competent with the IBM tools.
And from the individuals perspective it also make sense to bet on larger platforms. If you want to increase your odds of getting a new job, learning the AWS tools gives you a better ROI than learning the IBM tools.
A natural monopoly is a monopoly in an industry in which high infrastructure costs and other barriers to entry relative to the size of the market give the largest supplier in an industry, often the first supplier in a market, an overwhelming advantage over potential competitors. Specifically, an industry is a natural monopoly if a single firm can supply the entire market at a lower long-run average cost than if multiple firms were to operate within it. In that case, it is very probable that a company (monopoly) or a minimal number of companies (oligopoly) will form, providing all or most of the relevant products and/or services.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly
Consolidation is the inevitable outcome of free unregulated markets.
In our highly interconnected world, decentralization paradoxically requires a central authority to enforce decentralization by restricting M&A, cartels, etc.
Is there a theorem that models this behavior? Capital feels like a mass that attracts more mass the larger it becomes, like gravity.
Efficiency (aka cost) <---> Resiliency/redundancy
Pick your point on the scale
Maybe in a perfect world, or in a free market.
But the cloud compute market is basically centralized into 2.5 companies at this point. The point of paying companies like Azure here is that they've in theory centralized the knowledge and know-how of running multiple, distributed datacenters, so as to be resilient.
But that we keep seeing outages encompassing more than a failure domain, then it should be fair game for engineers / customers to ask "what am I paying for, again?"
Moreover, this seems to be a classic case of large barriers to entry (the huge capital costs associated with building out a datacenter) barring new entrants into the market, coupled with "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" level thinking. Are outages like these truly factored into the napkin math that says externalizing this is worth it?
Meredith Whittaker (of Signal) addressed your question the other day: https://mastodon.world/@Mer__edith/115445701583902092
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> How did we get here?
Stonks