[author: Alex]
So there you are, in your office, reading about the magical wonders of the cloud, and how you can escape the dreaded “vendor lock-in” of the enterprise world, you sign-up, without realizing what you’ve gotten yourself into.
Cloud-based vendor lock-in
If you think you can avoid vendor lock-in by switching to a cloud provider, let me ask you one question: How quickly can you move all your AWS services over to Rackspace? I know the answer: “nope”.
There’s a hidden cost associated with “moving to the cloud”, it’s the fact that you can’t get out of it. In reality, you’re moving to an even more locked-in solution which has the added inconvenience that they can read all your data.
With an actual on-premises solution, you may potentially be locked-in with your software vendor, but the data remains yours, and you generally maintain full control over it.
Cloud isn’t all that bad
I believe it does have some uses, for example: our blog is hosted on a cloud provider. Our blog posts are not a critical part of our infrastructure, and we’ll be thrilled if our cloud provider decides to read all our posts.
Debunking ReadMe’s on-prem post
In a recent post to Stackshare, the founder mentioned having “went on-premises in less than one week”. The clickbait title doesn’t make it obvious that what they really meant was “went from AWS to Docker on AWS in less than one week”.
Now of course, I think it’s good to have variety in the software world, and I’m happy they figured out how to create a Dockerfile, but the premise makes no sense to me. There’s nothing enterprise-y or on-prem about a documentation tool hosted on Amazon, other than the high price (remember, you also pay for the AWS instance, storage, and bandwidth).
Overall, I think the post was mostly aimed at promoting Replicated’s service, rather than ReadMe.io’s service, so let’s talk about that.
Debunking Replicated
I’d like to explain what really happens when you opt to use their solution.
For starters, you’ll be forced to convert your app to run in a Docker container – an unstable, not production-ready technology that is definitely not fit for the enterprise, and probably not for a few more years. Switching to container technology with something like Docker is not easy, which is why it took a very simple app, like ReadMe, one whole week to convert. Just for comparison, with Jidoteki it would only have taken a couple hours to fully convert ReadMe to an on-prem appliance.
We don’t force our customers to adopt any new technologies or processes, and they’re not required to search Stackoverflow for answers. We’ve also nailed down the versioning issue quite well, and have no problem supporting various outdated versions in the wild, even if that customer hasn’t updated since enterprise-v1.0.
Secondly, Replicated being a SaaS service, automatically locks you and your data into their platform. Once you decide to ship your application “on-premises” with them, you’ll be tied to them forever. That complements their wild pricing model which I’ll discuss next.
The pricing model is a percentage of your sales, which I assume is managed through the AWS Marketplace (I may be wrong about this). In any case, this means if you make $1000/mo, you pay them $100/mo (not bad, right?). But if you make $100,000/mo - which is not unusual for a company selling real enterprise software - then you’ll find yourself paying $120,000/year, and your costs will continue increasing as you use their service. Besides that, they will know exactly how much revenue your “on-prem” app is generating, and will maintain control over your keep. When times are hard, you can count on them trying to increase their cut (15%? 20%?). Eventually it makes more economic sense to hire a full-time engineering team to replace them – but wait, you’re locked into their platform, remember?
Let’s go back to that, assuming they were to suddenly open source their software and let you download/tweak/distribute it: how do you get off AWS? Once again, you and your customers find yourselves locked-in, and unable to move to a different provider.
What should you do?
It may sound like I keep repeating myself, but people and companies need to seriously consider the long-term implications of their technology and business choices. Closed platforms, obfuscated software, and unreasonable pricing models are real threats to your business, and are not to be taken lightly.
The best alternative is to use open technology platforms and solutions, like Jidoteki (disclaimer: we created Jidoteki).
With Jidoteki, you get a much more flexible, battle-tested, and stable solution than Replicated - without having to waste a week on trivial issues. We focus on virtual appliances which actually run on-premises. If our customer’s customers decide to put the appliance on AWS, that’s their choice. It’s definitely possible, and we may be able to help, but it’s not a requirement.
If our customers want to deploy their app on Docker, and are familiar with it and they know what they’re doing, then we’ll support that as well, but it’s not a requirement.
The software we provide for your appliance is 99% open source, with 1% being licensed liberally to your company. This means the “closed” part is actually quite open, we just don’t want it floating around freely on the internet, but you’re free to tweak and modify it to suit your needs. Generally we’re the ones doing the tweaking on our customers behalf.
Our pricing model uses a fixed setup cost, a fixed Jidometa perpetual license (optional, renewable yearly for updates), and a fixed monthly support plan (optional, for our awesome personalized support). This allows you to become extremely profitable without your costs increasing linearly. Our hope is to provide enough incentive to our customers to continue using our product and service, without needing to question whether “it would be cheaper to DIY”. They know their costs will remain fixed as they grow, and that’s good for business.
Of course, we also provide a dashboard for monitoring appliance health, the ability to download debug logs and other essential information, a REST API to manage the appliance, and other features (all open source), along with the guarantee that no external services are required to use the appliance (great for compliance).
Final notes
I think the Replicated team have a good concept, and it’s nice that they’re providing help for startups who need help with difficult container deployments.
We’re focused on much more complex stacks and applications, with more strict data, security, privacy, compliance, and cost requirements. If you find yourself in need of our help and would like to discuss with us, please feel free to contact us anytime.
Thanks for reading!