The word “cloud” has long existed in the English language. “The cloud” took on a technological meaning several years ago.
The concept of “the cloud” was originally met with skepticism. It seemed unlikely that companies would throw away the investments they’d made in servers and the infrastructure to support servers and would entrust their data to servers that they didn’t have physical access to and which were run and maintained by people who weren’t their employees.
The skeptics were wrong. Even though “the cloud” means a computer owned by someone who isn’t you, once all the cyberpunk and world of tomorrow imagery is stripped away, “the cloud” became so popular it’s a multi-billion dollar business for multiple companies.
And yet, problems remain.
Today I read the article “Basecamp details ‘obscene’ $3.2 million bill that caused it to quit the cloud” by Simon Sharwood in The Register (article dated 2023 Jan 16). That article led me to “The world was promised ‘cloud magic’. So much for that fairy tale” also by Simon Sharwood (article dated 2022 Nov 2), “VC’s paper claims cost of cloud is twice as much as running on-premises. Let’s have a look at that” by Tim Anderson (article dated 2021 Jun 02), and “AWS Free Tier, where’s your spending limit? ‘I thought I deleted everything but I have been charged $200′” also by Tim Anderson (article dated 2021 May 28), all in The Register.
If it wasn’t obvious from the titles, the common theme of these four articles is “the cloud” can be expensive.
Why am I writing about this in a Mindset post?
I believe one of the eternal human temptations is for each of us to believe we are uniquely special. Sure, there are rules which almost all of us agree apply to almost all of us, almost all of the time. But there is the temptation to then say under our breaths “but not to me.”
TANSTAAFL means There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.
The illusory promise of “the cloud” was the cost of hiring people who understood servers and server infrastructure, and the cost of buying, installing, using, and maintaining servers and their supporting infrastructure, could be farmed out to a different company and it would be cheaper and simpler. Even though there would be additional layers of cost and overhead because it was someone else’s employees and physical installation which was being used, that would still be better and cheaper.
I’ll even admit for many companies it was better and cheaper. For many companies, it’s still better and cheaper for right now.
There (still) Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. The servers cost money and so does the electricity, air conditioning, security, internet connections, employees to monitor and maintain the servers, and everything else which comes with having a data center.
Eventually someone has to pay that price. It’s very unlikely the cloud companies are running their businesses as charities or non-profits. And that means the cost comes back to the customers.