[HN Gopher] AWS Outposts 2021: Stories for Folks Who Love Spread...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       AWS Outposts 2021: Stories for Folks Who Love Spreadsheets
        
       Author : jen20
       Score  : 30 points
       Date   : 2021-01-30 18:04 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (ahl.medium.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (ahl.medium.com)
        
       | unclekev wrote:
       | Article is behind a pay wall
       | 
       | > Not every story on Medium is free, like this one. Become a
       | member to get unlimited access and support the voices you want to
       | hear more from.
        
         | tyingq wrote:
         | This worked for me: https://outline.com/aey3xV
        
       | thom wrote:
       | You can't read Medium without an app or logging in anymore?!
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | wmf wrote:
         | I was able to read it but I have various ad-blocking and
         | paywall-busting extensions installed.
        
         | ibatindev wrote:
         | For me, uBlock Origin with JavaScript disabled works all the
         | time.
        
       | baskire wrote:
       | Outposts might be priced higher to reduce demand. Allowing them
       | time to iron out the kinks.
       | 
       | It's a common pattern where you aren't yet ready to scale up to
       | handle the demand at a lower price point.
        
       | boulos wrote:
       | Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.
       | 
       | Adam's conclusion:
       | 
       | > I understand why customers want Outposts. Despite the grousing
       | in this post, I'm an AWS fan and have tremendous respect for
       | their rate of innovation. Customers want API-driven
       | infrastructure, the flexibility and speed of development that it
       | provides. Traditional on-premises vendors, most concisely
       | represented by the EMC/Dell/VMware conglomerate, have failed to
       | evolve their way into this experience which is why the hardware
       | and software from the hyperscalers (including Outposts) looks
       | quite different. Customers are faced with a literal dilemma: on
       | one hand they can continue buying the moderately priced,
       | expensive to operate, inefficient to use, legacy gear from
       | Dell/HPE/etc or they can pay exorbitantly for something like AWS
       | Outposts. The former is throwing good money after bad, investing
       | in an ecosystem that has continued to underdeliver; the latter
       | cedes more and more control to AWS and locks them into an
       | unaffordable future.
       | 
       | is a big reason for why I cared about making GKE on-prem / bare
       | metal a thing: I don't believe (most) customers on-prem want to
       | buy new hardware from a cloud provider. They mostly want to have
       | consistent API-driven infrastructure with their hybrid cloud
       | setup, and don't want to burn their millions of dollars of
       | equipment to the ground to do so.
       | 
       | I recognize that Oxide's bet is that customers will prefer to
       | stay on-premises if they can get cheaper / "better" hardware.
       | That's an interesting thesis! But many folks really want nothing
       | to do with owning and managing infrastructure, they just feel
       | forced to do so (and I agree with Adam here, it's non trivially
       | about the economics).
       | 
       | Edit to add: I commonly troll people with dell.com _list_ prices,
       | combined with colo provider cost of power, percentage spare,
       | redundant networking. A pile of boxes != Cloud, but that is what
       | companies want to compare to (the crossing point is not same
       | cost, but it's also not some huge integer multiple if your cost
       | of infrastructure matters to you; for some businesses
       | infrastructure costs do not matter, anymore than their power bill
       | does).
        
         | wmf wrote:
         | Anthos certainly has a different (one might say opposite)
         | approach to Outposts. I was surprised that Anthos apparently
         | doesn't use the GCE hypervisor, control plane, or Container-
         | Optimized OS. Is the customer fully responsible for hardware
         | management, OS/hypervisor installation/management, patching,
         | etc? Does all that work end up negating the benefits of
         | consistent API-driven infrastructure?
        
           | baskire wrote:
           | Anthos is closer to openstack than the cloud on-prem.
           | 
           | The appeal of cloud is so much more than software and apis.
        
       | marcinzm wrote:
       | In my experience, AWS tends to price things high to begin with
       | and then lower the price with time rather than risking
       | underpricing a thing. I can imagine that support costs can be
       | quiet high with a service like this.
        
       | wmf wrote:
       | The $80K rack overhead pays for the AWS control plane. You can't
       | get a _working, fully managed_ OpenStack or vCloud installation
       | for $27K /year. Every "private cloud" available now is overpriced
       | shit. Outposts is designed to be cheaper than its competition,
       | not radically cheap.
       | 
       | Also, does the $80K rack overhead include switches? That's around
       | $30K. Does it include EBS? etc.
        
         | ec109685 wrote:
         | With AWS, you are only leasing the system for 3 years, so the
         | $30k comparison for the switch isn't apples to apples.
        
       | trhway wrote:
       | It sounds on the scale of Oracle Exadata, not surprising given
       | the same target large enterprise and government customer.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2021-01-30 23:01 UTC)