There's another aspect to this, which I'm not sure even has a proper name. Misaligned incentives isn't quite it, more like... incentive scale misalignment. It

There's another aspect to this, which I'm not sure even has a proper name. Misaligned incentives isn't quite it, more like... incentive scale misalignment. It goes like this: Let's say you run a company that has a critical database that cost $10M in software licensing, $100M in software development, and is central to your $1B business. Now go host it on a cloud server that has margins of $10 per core per month. If that cloud vendor can cut your performance by 10% to save $1 without you switching providers, they will do that, because across millions of cores and millions of customers, that's huge money... for them. Sure, you've lost $111 million worth of performance on $1.11B of your stuff, but that's your problem. The cloud vendor's executives are whistling a happy tune while flipping through a yacht prospectus. They don't care about your lost efficiency, they care about their single digit dollar margins. You'll see this any time some huge company uses a platform, input material, or service that is very low cost relative to the value of the service or product that it goes into. As another random example: the quality of the cotton cloth that goes into name-brand T-shirts. You can buy a $100 shirt that has 10c of material in it because some guy worked very hard to make it as thin as physically possible to cut that down from 11c. He doesn't care if your nipples show through. Conversely, the companies with the best products in the world typically have good vertical integration. E.g.: Apple. PS: All major cloud providers use processor "C-states" to save a few dollars per server per month on their power and cooling costs. Turning that off is the magic turbo button on database servers. I do this for kit that I have direct access to. You can't do this in the cloud, and never will be allowed to, no matter how many millions of dollars this costs you. PPS: All cloud SLAs refund the cost of the service you purchased, not the value of the service you were unable to sell due to the outage.