[jiggawatts]

It's the result of MBA-driven enshittification.

"In the beginning" the clouds promised to use their scale to soak up your unpredictable demand. You as the customer didn't have to think about capacity, or planning ahead, budgets, opex, etc... Just swipe your credit card and go from zero to any number you please and back again at any time of your choosing. Because there are so many other customers using the cloud with you, the unpredictable nature of your individual usage is averaged out and the cloud vendor gets a (slightly) noisy but manageable usage level of their resources. They have to work a little harder to predict future capacity needs, but you pay a premium for this.

"A little later" the MBAs realise that they can squeeze 5% more profit out of their customers with lock-in contracts that make everything "nice and predictable" instead of the stochastic noise they had to "deal with" before. Getting rid of that makes things a lot harder for you as the customer, but they don't care. They care about that 5%.

Ta-da... we're back at having to "procure", we're back at budgets that have to be planned for 3 years in advance, we're back at having to have time machines.

[mxuribe]

Bleh and yuck! I'm finding myself nodding in agreement with all that you stated, but not feeling good about it because of the reality of things! :-)

[jiggawatts]

The reality is that with the maximum discount, the public cloud is still 2x the cost of comparable hosting providers (including on-prem).

More realistically, I've found that the cost is between 3x to 7x what people were paying for before.

I'm not surprised cloud adoption has slowed to a crawl. Azure and AWS won't admit this publicly because it would tank their share price, but they can't hide it from observant people. For example, they used to get the latest Intel or AMD CPUs before retail availability in huge numbers. Now? They're 2-3 generations behind because they're not rolling out new servers in significant numbers. The customers are all tightening their belts because of the global economic downturn, and one of the most expensive things they've been splurging on before was public cloud hosting.