[toomuchtodo]

Why people think cloud providers are benevolent provider of infra is beyond me. Their margin is because people are willing to pay it. Either run your own metal (k8s arguably makes this easier than VMs along in the past) or form a cloud coop, but absolutely don't be shocked when a business is taking money off the table because they can.

Don't marry yourself to a provider, stay portable, it's just good risk management. Pricing changes? Spin up a cluster elsewhere, migrate data, migrate traffic, profit. The terms of the agreement can change at any time.

[marcinzm]

Different companies make money using different approaches and it's perfectly valid to be upset at the approach a particular company is taking. Just because they provide a service doesn't mean they'll try to f* you over at every chance. For some it's bad long term business to do that.

AWS, for example, begins with high prices and then lowers them over time. It costs money but you know the maximum.

Google seems to be grabbing you with cheap prices and then jacking them up when you're committed (google maps is another example offhand). Maybe no on purpose but bad initial pricing and ill-intent have the same impact externally.

[the_duke]

> AWS, for example, begins with high prices and then lowers them over time. It costs money but you know the maximum.

That's only true for official pricing though.

I know of multiple cases where AWS had initially given significant discounts, only to stop doing so once they believed the customer to be firmly tied to the platform.

[toomuchtodo]

> AWS, for example, begins with high prices and then lowers them over time. It costs money but you know the maximum.

Past performance is no guarantee of future benevolence or reasonable behavior.

[matwood]

> Past performance is no guarantee of future benevolence or reasonable behavior.

Sure, but pushing prices down and eating competitors margin to the benefit of the customer has been Amazon's MO since inception.

Google seems to make a lot of missteps wrt pricing and the cloud. Remember the geo pricing change that put a lot of projects out of business??

[toomuchtodo]

Amazon's bandwidth charges are still extortionate. Have those ever gone down?

[marcinzm]

Same goes for metal, your data center can suddenly increase your prices massively or go bankrupt.

[toomuchtodo]

For sure! That's why I said, "Don't marry yourself to a provider, stay portable". Compute is a commodity, treat it as such.

[marcinzm]

Except that costs time and money, and for many people isn't worth it. Good business is not about eliminating risk but understanding and managing it.

For a startup, the risk of AWS doing something is tiny compared to all other risks so not worth spending effort to mitigate.

For a moderately sized company, true, being on multiple clouds may have an advantage.

For a large company, you get long term contracts with AWS that mitigate the risk.

[m0xte]

Yes I agree. But this industry is driven by fashion not engineering or risk analysis both of which are changed to fit the scenery. There are very few purists left who understand this.