[traceroute66]

> Cloud platforms are a lot like banks.

I would argue that your comparison is incorrect.

The correct comparison to a bank is dedicated hosting or own-hardware colocation.

Cloud providers are selling you an abstraction over that base.

Therefore the correct thing to compare cloud providers to are NBFIs (Non-Bank Financial Institutions).

NBFIs know they are not a bank, they know they can't sell you the trust-model of a bank. Instead they try to incentivise you with attractive sounding interest rates in the hope that you will conveniently disregard the fact that you will not benefit from the government-backed deposit safety scheme that you would gain with a bank.

[paulgb]

I think you're taking the analogy too literally. Of course there are certain dimensions where they differ; that's true of any analogy. OP's point is that in both cloud computing and banks, trust is the product.

[traceroute66]

> you're taking the analogy too literally

The OP was the one who said "there's no FDIC protection for cloud", so..... ;-)

> trust is the product

Well, to be fair, too many people put too much trust in the cloud.

"upload all your data to us, we promise we won't look at it" "trust our key-management service where we too have access to the private-key/API" etc. etc.

I wouldn't "trust" any of them further than I can throw a 1U server.