I would like to learn more about this. I'd have thought costs should go down over time. Are we doing more or is the cost per unit (not sure what that means) is

I would like to learn more about this. I'd have thought costs should go down over time. Are we doing more or is the cost per unit (not sure what that means) is truly going up? I think a number of factors add up over a 3-5 year timeline (obviously this will be more or less true for different organisations). There is the way the cost scales for a given instance in the cloud - in the old days, for example, doubling the memory or doubling the CPUs didn't double the cost of the kit, but it does for clouds VMs. Another example is that the cloud bills you for everything, in the old days I could have a database server on a network and query it as much as I liked, the cost was fixed upfront for the lifetime of the hardware. Whereas it's very cheap to get started with a managed offering but e.g. BigQuery charges you for every query, Cloud Functions charge you per invocation, bandwidth is chargeable etc. Speaking of hardware, in the old days you could look at your hardware and say, actually, it's fine, we don't need to upgrade/replace it this year after all, and it will just keep running. Whereas in the cloud the payment is continuous (perhaps offset by the fact that it's easier to "give back" excess capacity). There will come a point at which the cost of DIY vs cloud will cross over, the question is whether you will reach that point, and if so, what you will do about it, since you may be well and truly locked in at that point.