The new mantra with the cloud champions in my company is that cloud was never meant to save money. It’s a premium experience that’s about saving time.
This did not sound right so I dug into the emails our leadership sent us between 6-3 years ago upping our “cloud transformation”. And yup, saving money was a part of it.
It’s only over the last year or so where it’s become obvious we didn’t save any money and in fact spent a lot more that it’s become about functionality and quality and not about cost.
The cloud may beat on Prem on functionality. For example, global colocation is much easier with the cloud. But don’t f’ing gaslight me and tell me the cloud providers hadn’t been selling cost as a benefit and even the primary benefit for the first 10 years or so at least.
Whether or not using a cloud for a given workload today makes sense, the original mantra was absolutely around cost. The basic narrative was that computing was a utility and--especially before local solar was really a thing--how could an individual company compute/generate electricity competitively when they could just consume it off a grid?
> The new mantra with the cloud champions in my company is that cloud was never meant to save money. It’s a premium experience that’s about saving time.
But that's true, AWS really took off when people were developping Facebook apps and seeing exponential growth over a few days.
They wanted servers right now, but their supplier had 1 week of lead time to get a new machine, + setup time. On the other hand you could spin up a new EC2 machine in a few seconds.
During the time that this became a frequently-repeated marketing talking point, 'regular' hosting providers with one-day turnaround or even instant provisioning were already widespread. It was never really the revolutionary feature it was pitched as, honestly.
This did not sound right so I dug into the emails our leadership sent us between 6-3 years ago upping our “cloud transformation”. And yup, saving money was a part of it.
It’s only over the last year or so where it’s become obvious we didn’t save any money and in fact spent a lot more that it’s become about functionality and quality and not about cost.
The cloud may beat on Prem on functionality. For example, global colocation is much easier with the cloud. But don’t f’ing gaslight me and tell me the cloud providers hadn’t been selling cost as a benefit and even the primary benefit for the first 10 years or so at least.