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I know we have had cloud for about a decade, but for a while I wondered if we would eventually see a sort of bait-and-switch: Cloud providers raising prices lon

I know we have had cloud for about a decade, but for a while I wondered if we would eventually see a sort of bait-and-switch: Cloud providers raising prices long after most corporations have lost the in-house expertise to run a data center. Granted, I have no idea how the costs compare. In every company I have been at, the higher-ups tell us in tech we have to "learn about the business side of things", yet the business side never wants to share information.

ocdtrekkie 4y ago
Well, absolutely, but it's even worse than that: Cloud actually doesn't make sense for large, established companies. The benefits of quickly scaling up and down can make it worthwhile for a startup, but a company with a well-established business that has a predictable workload has no reason to pay extra for this. All of the large enterprises who have transitioned to cloud have really good sweetheart deals, often with additional ties to other business initiatives between the cloud provider and other enterprise. They know the savings they're getting is extremely short-term, and presumably they expect to re-acquire or retain the talent to leave eventually. Bear in mind, if you want an idea how little established enterprise values the cloud, in the year of our Lord 2022, the first automaker to transition to AWS is happening, announced last week: https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/13/23401350/bmw-amazon-web-service-cloud-software-connected-cars https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/13/23401350/bmw-amazon-web-... The way you can translate this is that if it took over a decade for the first automaker to transition to the leading cloud provider, few to no other auto manufacturers are outsourcing their data to the cloud. And I'm willing to bet BMW got a really epic deal to convince them to do it. The reason things like multi-cloud are so derided is that these companies' goals are to get you entirely dependent on their proprietary service design, so that it's too hard to ever leave. You can't go on-prem, you'd need to do a whole bunch of engineering to transition to a competitor's platform, etc. So you just suck it up and keep handing them a blank check every month.

ocdtrekkie 4y ago

Well, absolutely, but it's even worse than that: Cloud actually doesn't make sense for large, established companies. The benefits of quickly scaling up and down can make it worthwhile for a startup, but a company with a well-established business that has a predictable workload has no reason to pay extra for this. All of the large enterprises who have transitioned to cloud have really good sweetheart deals, often with additional ties to other business initiatives between the cloud provider and other enterprise. They know the savings they're getting is extremely short-term, and presumably they expect to re-acquire or retain the talent to leave eventually. Bear in mind, if you want an idea how little established enterprise values the cloud, in the year of our Lord 2022, the first automaker to transition to AWS is happening, announced last week: https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/13/23401350/bmw-amazon-web-service-cloud-software-connected-cars https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/13/23401350/bmw-amazon-web-... The way you can translate this is that if it took over a decade for the first automaker to transition to the leading cloud provider, few to no other auto manufacturers are outsourcing their data to the cloud. And I'm willing to bet BMW got a really epic deal to convince them to do it. The reason things like multi-cloud are so derided is that these companies' goals are to get you entirely dependent on their proprietary service design, so that it's too hard to ever leave. You can't go on-prem, you'd need to do a whole bunch of engineering to transition to a competitor's platform, etc. So you just suck it up and keep handing them a blank check every month.