I’ve been calling cloud “mainframe 2.0” since the 2000s. There are certain scale, convenience, and security benefits to mainframes but they come at the price of

I’ve been calling cloud “mainframe 2.0” since the 2000s. There are certain scale, convenience, and security benefits to mainframes but they come at the price of privacy, autonomy, latency, and sometimes cost depending on your exact utilization pattern. Personally I find it very dystopian but I’m a child of the PC and early Internet era and the idea of personal computing always seemed magical. On cost it’s like other capital assets: if you use it heavily and evenly it makes more sense to buy, but if you use it rarely or you need “burstable” use it’s better to rent.