Parler

Sun Jan 10 18:06:48 UTC 2021

On 1/10/21 9:36 AM, William Herrin wrote:
> First, this would appear to be an illustration of the single-vendor
> problem. You don't have a credible continuity of operations plan if a
> termination by a single vendor can take you and keep you offline. It's
> the single point of failure that otherwise intelligent system
> architects fail to consider and address. But more than that, cloud
> providers like Amazon tend to make it inconvenient approaching
> impossible to build cross-platform services. I kinda wonder what a
> cloud services product would look like that was actively trying to
> facilitate cross-platform construction?

I suppose it depends on how distributed your system design is. You 
certainly don't want to be running low latency necessary storage in one 
provider and servers in another. But you certainly need to architect for 
multi-region, and it seems to me that's the place to make the cut for 
cross provider as well. But AWS does have one incentive on the 
networking front: they want to peel off computing with corpro data 
centers which means they need to integrate with high speed vpn's and the 
like. Maybe somebody knows whether the likes of AWS and others are 
considered to be inside the corpro perimeter and how that works in a 
multi-tenancy world.

> Second, Amazon strongly encourages customers to build use of its
> proprietary services and APIs into the core of the customer's product.
> That's quite devastating when there's a need to change vendors.
> Parler's CEO described Amazon's action as requiring them to "rebuild
> from scratch," so I wonder just how tightly tied to such Amazon APIs
> they actually are. And if there isn't a lesson there for the rest of
> us.

Yes, it's been obvious to anybody who's only paying even a little 
attention that AWS is trying to be build a walled garden. It always 
surprises me how little people take into consideration that that almost 
never ends well for the people lured into the garden. As it ever were, I 
guess. I guess the lesson is that if you're sketch consider portability. 
If you're not sketch, consider portability anyway.

Mike