It’s also totally untrue that you need to adopt any specific proprietary features of public cloud to change your IT processes to break the ITIL straightjacket into a sane process. It’s just an abstraction, and there are plenty to choose from that work with whatever you already have.
First of all, they’re not actually managed services as we typically expect. The support experience is much more like a “hosted service”, with very circumscribed boundaries around feature scope, mostly because it is managed entirely by the kind robots rather than having humans actually manage anything.
Secondly, they’re lock in for debatable benefit.
Third, they’re almost always the way the clouds make their margin and you’re stuck with their design decisions, and have little control plane adjustability. Running Google Cloud SQL is expensive and crappy, I would much rather run my own DB on a Kubernetes cluster via a mature and commercially supported Kubernetes operator. Because it’s automated, reliable, and if I need to, I can get into the weeds.
Because the dirty secret is that all of the managed cloud services are just software, no different from what you install, they’ve just closed source certain components to make it seem magical. And yes you can file a ticket to get them to fix it, but remember the law of outsourced availability: you still own your SLO to your customer, you still own your end to end availability. All the “managed cloud” will do is cut you a check for the wasted pennies on a bill, while your customers leave and business tanks.
If you treat cloud like a commodity player that you can fire (not likely - more “shrink investments in favor of an alternative”) every few years if their quality goes down or price goes up, you’re in a much better position for cost, performance, and reliability. Same as it always was. The “one Throat to choke” theory of outsourcing was a always business school bullshit line that never really worked, and that now has been adopted by tech experts that want to ensure their cloud-specific skills are always relevant, regardless of whether these all proprietary features are really a good idea.
Speed + having no idea what you’re doing = use all the managed services!, this seems to be the cloud pundit elevator pitch. but as with anything, if you don’t know what you’re doing, at some point you will be caught being a sucker.
The multi-cloud, open source ecosystem continues to grow over many proprietary cloud services for these reasons.
