The Big Secret about Cloud Computing - It's Stupidly Expensive

Pixy Misa at Ambient Irony has the real tech news.

How much does it cost to delivery a terabyte of data?

Linode charges $5. DigitalOcean and Vultr charge $10. Microsoft Azure charges $80, Amazon charges $90, and Google Cloud charges $110. (Get Deploying)

AWS is what makes Amazon its profit, not shipping trillions of packages to billions of customers.

And what makes AWS profitable is overcharging you for simple services once you're locked in.

One terabyte used to sound like a lot of data. It really isn't today.

Which is why, later in the same post, we get the following:

Why companies are leaving the cloud. (InfoWorld)

It's fucking expensive.

Let's look closer at that InfoWorld article. Why companies are leaving the cloud.

Another significant driver was the failure to meet internal expectations, at 24%. “Unmet expectations” describes most technology trends I’ve been involved with, including client/server, enterprise application integration, service-oriented architecture. and now cloud. Those surveyed also cited unexpected costs, performance issues, compatibility problems, and service downtime.

The most common motivator for repatriation I’ve been seeing is cost. In the survey, more than 43% of IT leaders found that moving applications and data from on-premises to the cloud was more expensive than expected.

In other words the executives were sold a bill of goods. "These IT people are expensive, wouldn't it be better to give everything to Amazon?" This was always the way things happened in IT. From outsourcing - which was expensive, and in every instance I was involved in most people left - I ALWAYS left the company when they said an outsourcing deal was signed. So they paid more, and got application support from people who didn't know the applications.

Web-based systems was another. I remember one company where they couldn't understand why their new/fancy system had destroyed productivity in the call center. (Green-screen systems were not pretty, but they were usually blindingly fast.)

The other big issue, aside from cost, is security. That was listed by 33% of companies.

On a personal note everything you store in the cloud, from photos, to documents, you lose all expectation of privacy. You did hand the data to someone else, after all. I store stuff on the cloud - mostly stuff I really don't want to loose, like tax documents, my password manager database, etc. But I encrypt the documents before I upload them. I just use the standard AES encryption standard (the Rijndael algorithm), because I am trying to hide from employees of the cloud company, and any hackers they may let in through the back door; I'm not trying to hide from the three-letter agencies. Twofish is actually a better encryption algorithm, but the support for AES, by just downloading an app and off you go, is too easy. Yes, you do need to remember the PW for the file, but that is what a password manager is for - remembering passwords.

AI is the current new thing. "It will make IT cheaper, we're sure!" Actually it will make everything cheaper, right up to the point that it doesn't.