[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.