The Unconventional Guide: The Cloud Is Not Your Data Center

Links

• Forrest Brazeal article referenced: https://acloudguru.com/blog/engineering/the-lift-and-shift-shot-clock-cloud-migration
• Unconventional Guide: https://www.duckbillgroup.com/resources/unconventional-guide-to-aws-cost-management/ 

Transcript

Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Fairwinds. Whether you’re new to Kubernetes or have some experience under your belt, and then definitely don’t want to deal with Kubernetes, there are some things you should simply never, ever do in Kubernetes. I would say, “run it at all;” They would argue with me, and that’s okay because we’re going to argue about that. Kendall Miller, president of Fairwinds, was one of the first hires at the company and has spent the last six years the dream of disrupting infrastructure a reality while keeping his finger on the pulse of changing demands in the market, and valuable partnership opportunities. He joins senior site reliability engineer Stevie Caldwell, who supports a growing platform of microservices running on Kubernetes in AWS. I’m joining them as we all discuss what Dev and Ops teams should not do in Kubernetes if they want to get the most out of the leading container orchestrator by volume and complexity. We’re going to speak anecdotally of some Kubernetes failures and how to avoid them, and they’re going to verbally punch me in the face. Sign up now at fairwinds.com/never. That’s fairwinds.com/never.

Pete: Hello, and welcome to the AWS Morning Brief: Fridays From the Field.

Jesse: I like that. I feel like that's good. That's a solid way to start us off.

Pete: Triple F. I am Pete Cheslock.

Jesse: I'm Jesse DeRose.

Pete: #TripleF. We should get some, I don’t know, jackets made? Mugs?

Jesse: Lapel pins? I'm open. I've always wanted a Members Only jacket.

Pete: If Guy Fieri can call diners, drive-ins, and dives, “Triple D,” then we can definitely call this Triple F.

Jesse: We can definitely make this happen. 

Pete: It's not my high school transcript, either, we're talking about here. Oh, well, we are back again, continuing our series on The Unconventional Guide to Cost Management with Episode Two: the Cloud is not your data center.

Jesse: Yeah, this one's gonna be a fun one. I feel like this is a topic that comes up a lot in conversations, sometimes with clients, sometimes with potential clients that are asking, “What kind of things do you see day-to-day? What are some of the big pain points that you see with your cost optimization work?” And so real quick backstory, make sure that you've listened to the previous few episodes to get some context for this segment that we're doing and get some framing for this Unconventional Guide work that we are discussing. But talking about using the Cloud as a data center, I have a lot of thoughts on this.

Pete: Well, hold on a second. Isn't the Cloud just someone else's data center?

Jesse: [laugh] I—yeah, you know, this is the same argument of serverless isn't actually serverless. It's just somebody else's computer.

Pete: [laugh]. Someone else's Docker container. But really, there's a lot of ways we're going with this one. But we're coming at it from, obviously, a cost management perspective. And the big, bold, unpopular opinion that we're gonna say is, the most expensive way to run an application in the Cloud, is by treating the Cloud as just another data center; it's going to cost you way more than it would cost to run in a normal data center. And this goes to the world of, in the early days of Cloud, people just raging online and in conferences about the Cloud, it's so expensive. And yes, it is so expensive, if you treat it like an antiquated data center.

Jesse: And really quick before you get your pitchforks out, there is this concept of ‘lift and shift’ that everybody likes to talk about or ‘technical transformation’ that everybody likes to talk about: moving from a data center into the Cloud, which a lot of people see as this movement where they just uproot everything from their local data center into AWS. And to be clear, we do recommend that. That is a solid strategy to get into the Cloud as fast as possible; just move those workloads over. But it is going to be expensive, and it's not what you ultimately want to stick with long term. So, that's ultimately the big thing to think about here. 

Yes, lifting and shifting from your data center into the Cloud is absolutely worthwhile. But it creates this shot clock that's now running after your migration is complete, where if you don't move on to all of the services, and opportunities, and solutions that AWS provides that are native solutions, cloud-native solutions, managed solutions, you're going to end up spending a lot more money than you want.

Pete: Yeah, “The Lift And Shift Shot Clock” that was a great blog post by Forrest from ACG—ACloudGuru. We'll include a link to that in the [00:04:35 show notes]. It talks about how not only do you have technical debt accruing as you lift and shift, but potentially the brain drain as people get sick of managing this hot mess that you've lifted and shifted over. That doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. 

You absolutely should get into the Cloud, get into a singular vendor with your workloads as fast as possible so that you can then dedicate resources to refactoring all of that. Don't just forget about it and leave it behind. It's not going to end well for you. And you do have a time; the timer is running. So, when you're only using those core primitives—compute, object store, block store—yeah, you're going to have a pretty fixed cost on your cloud bill. 

But to Jesse's point, there's a lot of other services. Some of those require an engineering effort. Some of those just involve correctly using an instance type, a storage location that is more specific to its access patterns. I mean, everything is basic as T class instances—for those services that maybe don't use a lot of CPU—to reminding yourself that there are multiple tiers of S3 storage. Even Intelligent Tiering will just tier it for you. 

So, if you go and store everything on standard S3 storage and use GP2 volumes on EC2, yeah, it's gonna be expensive. And I know that because I look at a lot of Amazon bills, and Jesse does too, and we see the same thing. “Oh, you've got a really high bill.” “Yeah, we spend a lot on EC2.” It's, “Like, oh, let me guess. A lot of, like, I3s and C5s and M5s and a ton of EBS, right?” And they give you all this optionality, and I think it's that choice which is so overwhelming for many folks moving to the Cloud. I mean, that's, that's really the case. It's just, “What do I pick?” There's just so much.

Jesse: So, let's talk about ephemerality, especially in the world of compute. Ephemerality really ...