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SpamHaus's recent "Too big to care? - Our disappointment with Cloudflare’s anti-abuse posture" post does have a bit of a nit in it.
In that SpamHaus uses cloudflare itself:
$ dig www.spamhaus.org +short
www.spamhaus.org.cdn.cloudflare.net.
104.16.199.238
104.16.198.238Now, I know that is a We Should Improve Society Somewhat type of criticism, but it is worth reflecting on if you are calling a supplier out for being bad... why are you giving them market share and enabling them that little bit more? (Even though I'm reasonably sure these days cloudflare has moved beyond the credibility need for those domains.)
It's complex, I have mixed views on cloudflare (even having worked there for 5~ years a while ago), they do cool stuff, and I still even use them for my blog. But cloudflare is a more of a wider discussion on do you want "individual" accountability on the internet for things like outages/policy/legal, or are we willing to accept the mass market cost decreases by merging that into the hands of a small bundle of players.
The services that the "internet centralisation" player provide are for the most part, genuinely useful and good (otherwise people would not use them). There is often this view from some folk that orgs are being forced at proverbial gunpoint to use AWS/Azure/Google/Cloudflare, but some of the alternatives are either a lot more work or cost significantly more overall, and it's probably the job of a higher power entity (IE, regulation) to control the "outage contagion" risk. Or not, depends on what stake holders want.
One of the low stakes conspiracy theories that I have is that AWS has either intentionally or unintentionally become one of the greatest reasons why people use AWS and find themselves trapped in Cloud provider ecosystems even when it makes financial sense to not operate in that environment.
I have spoken to a decent number of enterprise's (partly through contracting and partly through just events) and when people discuss about the inabilities to move from cloud IaaS back to "on-prem" ( even though they understand the it is very financially advantages for them to do so ), almost all of them these days cite the fact that they are unable to hire anybody to manage it for them, or if they do it is too expensive.
I think this is one of the most fascinating issues. The people who used to run such on-prem systems have either left the industry entirely or have moved on to managing AWS setups, and the new people entering the industry have not typically had any pressure to learn how to do such deployments, the result is the people who do need to use "on-prem" now have to pay a significant premium for experienced people who can do such work, thus lending more benefit to AWS even though it is more expensive on the face of it to operate.
It's hard to know if someone like AWS has actually planned this far ahead ( something that honestly I would doubt ) but it's a very interesting "chilling effect"
Don't get me wrong, some of what the IaaS providers offer is awesome, It's hard for me to offer anything close to the "Automatic Scaling Group" function that can just summon compute out of no where. But also, quite a lot of shops just don't need that, or if they do, it's likely cheaper to just have the capacity sitting idle as the overall costs are lower
@benjojo @bob a benefit people don’t seem to talk about so much is not having to think about asset management and lifecycles *at all*.
I can switch my entire workload from c5 to c7 with no planning or penalty as long as I’m using savings plans
Although it’s not so simple on RDS due to instance-class-specific RIs
@glenjamin @benjojo indeed. I also enjoy telling our iso27001 auditors that our capacity planning is that we run on aws so don't care.