Is Cloud Native development a cash cow by big tech?

Question

I was looking through the CNCF tools and certificates, with all the cloud deployment options, and realised the main advocates are Google and Amazon. They appear to make these cloud options seem sexy while it's also very hard to move away from a cloud system once it's built. By sexy, I mean people like to build things how Google builds things and Resume-driven development means that this can result in higher salaries for the people using these tools.This might be a cynical view, but is the modern approach of software engineering just a giant sales campaign ran by cloud providers to increase their profits?

Nextgrid · Accepted Answer

The principles are sane and good, however they indeed only really apply for world-scale problems, and in my opinion very few problems actually are world-scale.
VC-bankrolled garbage that wants to take over the world from day 1 would fit, however most legitimate business problems require nowhere near this scale and at that point "cloud native" development may be a downside in the form of unnecessary complexity.
For legitimate business problems (where conquering the world from day 1 isn't a priority), don't underestimate how powerful one or two bare-metal machines can be, and you can get those for less than 100 bucks a month from Hetzner or OVH, with unlimited bandwidth to boot.
Reliability may be a concern, but modern hardware is pretty reliable and cloud-native development involves tons of moving parts that come with their own downsides. I've seen more outages caused by all that extra complexity and operator error than hardware failure. AWS us-east-1 happens to be down right now for example, but my old-school bare-metal machines and network hardware are all still running.
It is however "uncool" which means you'll have more trouble acquiring talent. You don't have the option to have resume-driven people queue up to work for you for low salaries because you work with the new shiny, you actually have to pay good money and make efforts to retain these people.

PaulHoule · Answer

Expensive certifications were a thing long before the cloud. Look at the Microsoft certifications, Oracle certifications, Red Hat certifications, etc.My current cloud-native side project is based in AWS but I don't see any fundamental problem migrating it to Azure or Cloudflare. I can think of hypothetical reasons why I would want to, but practically making it portable and running multiple instances of it is the last priority compared to all the other work it needs.

jqpabc123 · Answer

There is some vendor lock-in going on but you don't have to play along. You can always use the cloud as a simple, cheaper alternative to co-location or self hosting.This way you keep your options open and can easily move from one cloud to another or back to self hosted if needed.

throwaway894345 · Answer

Personally a lot of the &ldquo;cloud native&rdquo; things like Kubernetes are just easier to wrangle than manually, imperatively configuring a bunch of hosts.

emteycz · Answer

Cloud native development most definitely has merit. Even when done with proprietary tech. IME, for most workloads, I save money, not pay more.

Is Cloud Native development a cash cow by big tech?

There is some vendor lock-in going on but you don't have to play along. You can always use the cloud as a simple, cheaper alternative to co-location or self hosting.
This way you keep your options open and can easily move from one cloud to another or back to self hosted if needed.

Personally a lot of the “cloud native” things like Kubernetes are just easier to wrangle than manually, imperatively configuring a bunch of hosts.

Cloud native development most definitely has merit. Even when done with proprietary tech. IME, for most workloads, I save money, not pay more.