Dear hosters, you are selling wood, not furniture

Earlier, I wrote that there isn’t just one type of cloud; it ranges from renting out servers to fully managed office software as a service.

One relevant type of cloud use is what’s informally called “cloud-native.” I wrote in that earlier page that a “cloud-native developer” does not work based on servers. If you rent out virtual servers and call yourself a cloud company, a cloud-native developer won’t understand you at all. They don’t work with computers; they need services. To them, you aren’t a cloud.

From the perspective of the traditional server business, such a developer is unfortunately often seen as rather helpless—someone who needs assistance with everything, can’t run their own database, and has no idea what a nameserver is. “The kind of developer who cooks with pre-packaged meals but can’t even fry an egg themselves.”

But on the other hand, have you ever taken a good look at those cloud “pre-packaged cloud meals”? Some of them are truly AMAZING. Besides complete databases that you never have to worry about, there are also large building blocks that (expensively) solve problems that would otherwise take an enormous amount of effort to do properly.

Signing Up and Secure Login

Let’s highlight just one example: AWS Cognito, known at Microsoft as Azure Active Directory B2C and at Google as Identity Platform.

With these services, new users can sign up for a service. If done via email, their email address is verified. This is a major hassle to get right these days, as I can attest from personal experience. Once registered, users can log in again in all sorts of ways (including two-factor authentication), with protection against account takeovers or password-guessing attempts.

If someone tries to program this themselves, they either do it incorrectly (or not well enough) or keep an expert busy for weeks and weeks. And even then, it wouldn’t be as seamless as AWS/Google/Azure!

Dear Hosting Providers, You Sell Wood, but Modern Developers Want Furniture

Countless developers and companies have chosen to take giant leaps forward by using high-level services like Cognito. Ready-made, working solutions—possibly for a lot of money in the long run. But they do exist and are available.

And it absolutely PAINS me to see European hosting providers advertising, “just come to our cloud”.

Photo by Sarah Worth on Unsplash

This is like a lumberyard advertising with pictures of beautiful furniture. Yes, that furniture is made of wood.

But the far larger market is for ready-made furniture. But you aren’t selling it.

You sell (beautiful) wood. But you often act as if you’re selling furniture. And that’s just not the case, even though that’s exactly what the world is looking for.

Get to Know the Cloud

I regularly speak with European hosting companies eager to get more cloud business, but they truly have no idea what exists in the ‘cloud-native’ world.

There’s a lot of denial going on, also among techies who love to say, “there is no cloud, just other people’s computers.” Even if that were the case, those other people’s computers have some REALLY cool software running on them.

I highly recommend browsing through the catalog of the furniture sellers. Not everything is equally good or affordable, but it’s crucial to understand what the world is moving toward (even if maybe they shouldn’t).

You Do Sell Beautiful Wood, Though

Meanwhile, Americans are coming to Europe to rent servers—because we’re actually really good at that here. Well done!

I have a pretty expensive garden table at home, and honestly, I regret it a little. Because with the right wood, I could have built that table myself for far less money—if I knew anything about working with wood, which I don’t.

And this is also the gap between the bare metal/virtual server folks and the cloud inhabitants. Those of us in the server world know that, in the end, cloud users pay enormous bills. That you have no control over how people log in with AWS Cognito. And that the Americans are watching.

But the cloud user builds a secure login system in no time. And while it’s much better to understand the details when you become big and successful, most customers either never reach that point or will deal with it when they do.

By the way, there are many important organizations (like SIDN, the .NL people) that urgently need to relearn how to work with wood. Because it’s beyond painful to hear them say that “nobody in Europe can run our administration anymore”. Anyone who is big or important (such as governments!) should no longer accept that the core of their operations would collapse without American support!

So, What Now?

There’s always much more business to be made if you can sell to less tech-savvy people. This is generally true. However, if you truly want to offer a “cloud stack” yourself, you have a massive amount of work ahead. If you are a smaller company, you simply won’t be able to do that. With a small team, you can keep your servers running overnight.

But if you start selling 24/7 sign-up/sign-in services, it’s a whole different game. That requires incredibly solid software, much more management, and a lot of care. And developer-like operations people on call. You can’t just do that on the side.

In the meantime, please don’t try to tell people that you’re a realistic alternative to AWS/Azure/Google. Because for most modern companies, that’s simply not true—they don’t rent servers or even containers; they use smart services. And if you don’t offer those, and you fail to deliver on your promises even once, people will never trust you again.

Earlier, I wrote about how European companies could collaborate to build great software, which would allow us all to provide strong high-level services.

And since we’re excellent at managing servers and bandwidth (“wood”), we should be able to build those services, too.

I sincerely hope we’ll do this together!