| To cloud or not to cloud is the same as any outsourcing decision. For many operations, you may get to a point where it makes sense to build your own cloud. If you're a seller, you might also get to a point where you want to sell goods directly. It partly depends on your core expertise, meaning, is this part of how your business creates value? If NASA doesn't want be a datacenter provider, they should continue to outsource it. It also depends on whether their business model aligns with yours. AWS's egress rules specifically work when you are getting revenue from the data being downloaded. If you're selling software or other media, and you can factor the cost of downloads into the price of it, pay-for-egress is very sustainable. Other models like pay-for-capacity don't align as well if you want to maintain a large library of media and people are attracted by the variety, but only download the popular stuff. For NASA, pay-for-egress may be entirely justified if their budget is based on usage of the data. Or if they can simply use "requester pays" to mitigate the cost. |