The lie of cloud services is ephemerality and elasticity. We convince ourselves that this hacked together solution is not actually going to run for years, or th

The lie of cloud services is ephemerality and elasticity. We convince ourselves that this hacked together solution is not actually going to run for years, or that we need instant scale 50x our current capacity. For most is that resources turn on and never turn off. This is why so much of the cost reduction conversation revolve around RI purchases. The real secret is that compute isn't the driving factor in cost - its bandwidth. I've had too many conversations where people are congratulating themselves on their $0.027/GB PPA only to explain that they are paying effectively $8.00/Mbps for a network link. The real threshold is network consumption and when you cross it figuring out a hybrid strategy is the best path.