Cloud Services Market Is 'Not Working,' Says UK Regulator (www.gov.uk) 39
The UK's competition watchdog has found that its $11.2 billion cloud services market "is not working," with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft each controlling up to 40% of the market. In provisional findings released Tuesday, the Competition and Markets Authority said the lack of competition likely leads to higher costs and reduced innovation for UK businesses. The regulator has recommended designating both companies with "strategic market status," which would allow closer scrutiny of their practices, including Microsoft's software licensing and AWS's data transfer fees.
Reap what you sow (Score:5, Insightful)
For years governments around the world have been offering big tech all kinds of breaks in the name of creating jobs.
Jobs at massive datacenters with one tiny office in the corner.
And now they're surprised there isn't enough competition?
Re:Reap what you sow (Score:4, Interesting)
Speaking of reaping what you sow, I wonder how effective this stuff will be now we have brexited. We don't have the clout we used to, and anything that diverges from the EU will be an extra cost for companies.
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That asshole is now opening up S. and Latin America and the Caribbean further to the Chinese who are only more than happy to supplant the U.S., now that the U.S. cannot be relied upon. Mexico is casting eyes on China, Canada won't be far behind. China has projects all throughout that region, even in the Bahamas. Pretty soon it will be America the Outcast when they figure out they no longer need it. There go the S. and Latin and Caribbean markets.
Another wonderful foot shot is the migrant raids. Apparently,
'The Cloud' is inherently flawed to begin with (Score:4, Insightful)
I think people are realizing this, have seen companies just decide to end a 'cloud service', leaving people hanging, or worse, leaving them with hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of digital purchases that now just evaporate because they can't move them somewhere else -- not even to their own computers, tablets, or phones.
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If you are building a business, and use cloud services as hour hosting model, you are very quickly "addicted" to these services. Should the services shut down suddenly, your business ends just as suddenly. Should the cloud services give you some time to download everything, you suddenly need to scramble to find a way to store it all or a rival cloud service to transfer it all to, but furthermore you may have a LOT of code that is tightly-coupled to the service you have been using, which all needs to be re
Require Companies (Score:3, Funny)
Maybe the govt can randomly select a certain number of citizens and require them to start cloud services companies. If the people don't have the money or know-how to do so, they can be fined until they are in compliance.
Stick to Kubernetes (Score:2)
There is a good general remedy (Score:5, Interesting)
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This may work for other democracies which haven't perverted the interpretation of their constitution, and who don't get in a tizzy fit about whether or not things are constitutional or not.
In the United States, the "unconstitutional card" is played way too often, and over the course 200 years or so there have been several supreme court rulings which
have (in my opinion) weakened the protection of the Bill of Rights. Corporate personhood, and who can contribute to re-election campaigns are probably the bigge
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Your comment is grossly ignorant. Corporate personhood is older than the United States. "who can contribute to re-election campaigns" is self-refuting as a coherent concept, and incoherent as something that has changed recently.
If you want examples of Supreme Court rulings that undermined the Bill of Rights and what it protected then look at the Slaughter-House Cases (freedom of contract) and the New Deal court's rubber-stamping of FDR's economic controls, which led to cases like marijuana grown entirely
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The word "worth" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. What is "worth"? Is it the market cap based on some unrelated secondary market (the stock market)? The Wall Street value of outstanding stock is rarely if ever related to any fundamentals of companies. A run on a stock can push its market cap over $100 billion for no reason and then suddenly the company needs to be broken up?
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A run on a stock can push its market cap over $100 billion for no reason and then suddenly the company needs to be broken up?
There are scenarios in which this can happen, but almost any company which is large enough to eventually cross that threshold is probably a net benefit for society if it was broken up into smaller companies...
The word "worth" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. What is "worth"?
My suggestion would be - average revenue over the last 5 years.
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Lack of competition? (Score:2)
Sure 80% of the cloud market is those two; but that ignores that some things aren't in the cloud at all. There are quite a few reasonable providers out there...people just don't always pick them.
On prem data centers still work. Not everything is cloud. This is like saying the transportation industry is failing because I can't get airfare from my home to my office, it is a slightly different transportation task and has a different solution.
The cloud is a trap (Score:5, Insightful)
Run away!
It was not designed to make things better, it was designed to take away control while making obscene profits
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If you are a small online business and/or a startup, cloud services can save you a lot of money and a lot of pain.
You are going to need online hosting in one form or another. Either you run your data center yourself, in your office, or you pay someone else to run your data center for you. If you run it yourself, you have the very high upfront costs of buying the necessary hardware, INCLUDING buying more horsepower than you need in hopes of growing your business in the near future. You must also pay staff
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It may be me, but I'm starting to see a worsening blurring of the word "cloud".
To me "cloud" is Amazon "buckets", or whatever others call it. A VM that someone has to admin, and can run whatever the thing supports.
For small local businesses, they just need some kind of web and maybe email hosting. Would you necessarily call that "cloud"? (like a godaddy or wordpress or some other cpanel or other simple admin thing)
AWS (Score:2)
There's a reason there's tons of memes in the IT world about how expensive AWS is. Yes, "cloud services" reduce the need to manage on-site hardware, and it does have its uses (eg, off-site backups become a lot easier), but at the end of the day to a large degree cloud services end up costing more than you'd pay to just buy servers and keep them on-site.
Similarly, a lot of our software vendors as of late have been wanting to move to a software as a service model. They tout the awesomeness of not having to
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at the end of the day to a large degree cloud services end up costing more than you'd pay to just buy servers and keep them on-site.
I'd argue that most of these comparisons involve some level of apple-to-oranges comparison. How many companies are actually setting up an on-prem solution with levels of redundancy (staffing, network, power, cooling, etc.) and physical security comparable to running your service across multiple AWS regions? Companies that actually try to achieve that on-prem are operating on a larger scale and with more in-house talent than most.
I'd also argue that a lot of the cost comparisons unfavorable to a cloud so
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We have customers in other countries and they require the data to be 'local', meaning we can't host that data in a US datacenter.
It is relatively easy for us to spin a new AWS region in Canada, Spain, Switzerland with exactly the right amount of resources for that month. I we were to open physical locations in these countries, we could not do it at all.
Even worse, it is getting harder and harder to recruit people that are willing to go to a physical datacenter at 3AM and troubleshoot failing hardware.
Sure y
In the "LAMP* age" independent (Score:1)
...hosters were common. Why can't that still be the case? How are MS and Amazon able to keep them down? (Our org is slow to cloud, so I don't have enough experience to spot the bottleneck.)
* Linux, Apache, MySql/MariaDB, Php/Perl/Python
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Yes, agreed. And as I posted above, an end user doesn't even need to care about LAMP, they just need web and maybe email hosting, or some kind of webform for messaging. So, minimal admin, cpanel, wordpress, similar.
I'm actually admin for such a thing: simple websites, wordpress, looked into a few other specialty back-end things but potential customers vanished. It's tiny, has shrunk over the years. Owner has no interest in the thing. Many huge players, considerations, etc.
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Yeah, if it's easy enough, tough to beat free.
I use an IP blocker and so far so good. Won't stop the Verizon FIOS link from getting clobbered, but it's got a lot of bandwidth. At that point it'll just choke the gateway.
There's a way to start the fix... (Score:4, Interesting)
Give some government contracts to some of those smaller companies. Let Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Oracle be ineligible for some contracts, giving some of these smaller players a means of scaling up by letting government contracts function as startup/scale-up capital.
The reason everyone uses those companies is because nobody wants the perceived liability. If you use Microsoft and they screw up, nobody asks why you didn't use Hetzner. If you use Hetzner and they screw up, everyone asks why you didn't use Microsoft.
Of course, there would be a need to avoid shenanigans; if Amazon is prevented from bidding, there will suddenly be "Totally-Not-Amazon Enterprises, Inc." before the ink is dry.
But really, I'd love to see this guy be a pioneer in initiating a government department of software developers, whose job is to be an avenue-of-first-resort for government software projects, with everything developed having some sort of government-GPL license to it (some minor stipulations on liability and contributions, etc.). This way, it would create a baseline for compatibility that isn't chosen by AWS or Microsoft, but instead by the government, for government projects.
The Price Of People (Score:2)