> My biggest question is whether cloud providers could achieve a scale where they are able to offer the most optimal infrastructure costs for specific businesses. Maybe this is the case for smaller or mid-size companies, but I'd be interested to see where the inflection point lies.
Disclosure: I work at Microsoft on Azure, but I’m on the product/dev tool side not on infra.
I think this is already happening to a certain extent and will happen more in more verticals as time goes on. There are massive government use cases for the cloud and it isn’t as if governments and agencies haven’t been maintaining their own datacenters and servers before. Clouds optimized for healthcare are also a thing and are only becoming bigger — again, industries that have long maintained their own infra.
You also have the private cloud model, which OpenStack pioneered but Azure Stack and AWS Outpost have put their own spin on, which essentially lets you host specific cloud services and tools on your own infrastructure.
There are always going to be some businesses that reach a size and scale where it doesn’t make sense to offload to the cloud, where paying for people to do maintenance and support, build out monitoring, handle everything soup to nuts makes sense. I think Dropbox, which is a storage provider, is a key example of that.
I talked with the then CTO of Dropbox right after it finished moving from AWS to it’s own datacenters and the process was extraordinary and really impressive. For what Dropbox is doing, it makes sense that it owns and operates its own infrastructure and storage and tooling.
Of course, you can also have the inverse. Zynga famously moved off AWS as its demand peaked and it saw the cost savings, and then had to move back to it, after demand died down and the numbers of owning and maintaining its own infrastructure no longer made sense.
Netflix has moved much of its stuff in-house, but still relies on AWS and likely will for quite some time.
But on the whole, yes, I absolutely see cloud providers moving to offer specific business and business vertical centric solutions with pricing that is lower than what those businesses could achieve on their own, even if you take some of the “services” stuff out of it snd are just looking at raw infrastructure costs.
Disclosure: I work at Microsoft on Azure, but I’m on the product/dev tool side not on infra.
I think this is already happening to a certain extent and will happen more in more verticals as time goes on. There are massive government use cases for the cloud and it isn’t as if governments and agencies haven’t been maintaining their own datacenters and servers before. Clouds optimized for healthcare are also a thing and are only becoming bigger — again, industries that have long maintained their own infra.
You also have the private cloud model, which OpenStack pioneered but Azure Stack and AWS Outpost have put their own spin on, which essentially lets you host specific cloud services and tools on your own infrastructure.
There are always going to be some businesses that reach a size and scale where it doesn’t make sense to offload to the cloud, where paying for people to do maintenance and support, build out monitoring, handle everything soup to nuts makes sense. I think Dropbox, which is a storage provider, is a key example of that.
I talked with the then CTO of Dropbox right after it finished moving from AWS to it’s own datacenters and the process was extraordinary and really impressive. For what Dropbox is doing, it makes sense that it owns and operates its own infrastructure and storage and tooling.
Of course, you can also have the inverse. Zynga famously moved off AWS as its demand peaked and it saw the cost savings, and then had to move back to it, after demand died down and the numbers of owning and maintaining its own infrastructure no longer made sense.
Netflix has moved much of its stuff in-house, but still relies on AWS and likely will for quite some time.
But on the whole, yes, I absolutely see cloud providers moving to offer specific business and business vertical centric solutions with pricing that is lower than what those businesses could achieve on their own, even if you take some of the “services” stuff out of it snd are just looking at raw infrastructure costs.