I don't think 1) locking in customers via proprietary APIs 2) limiting supply of resources 3) auctioning off to the highest bidder among your locked in customers was entirely the core feature of clouds. Rather, the idea was "we'll charge so much margin you never need to worry about anything physical, another machine is just an API call away". You don't need to overprovision for peak times and there is less physical stuff on your balance sheet, ez cash flow, win win!
Of course now everyone realizes it's a big sham and neither Amazon nor Microsoft are stupid enough to spend a trillion capex on building the datacenters, fiber lines and so on you need to handle a temporary 700% pandemic situation. In a year from now, they don't want that stuff on their quarterly report just as companies going "cloud only" don't want it.
To be fair, a situation where every single company in the world needed to ramp up on the cloud at the same time is completely unprecedented, and spending the money to do it would've been considered a fools' errand.
If people weren't on the cloud, you'd see them scrambling for physical hardware, which also isn't exactly easy to come by on extremely short notice when the world's logistic chains are under stress as well.
I think given the growth these cloud providers are having every year, expanding to meet the needs of a temporary increase in demand looks more like moving forward projects that were already planned. Itβs not like they are going to have to build a bunch of datacenters they will never need again.
The article probably overstates actual increase in demand, picking some small subunit which has experienced outsized increased use. They may well want to continue expanding their core hardware capacity at 20%+ annually.
Of course now everyone realizes it's a big sham and neither Amazon nor Microsoft are stupid enough to spend a trillion capex on building the datacenters, fiber lines and so on you need to handle a temporary 700% pandemic situation. In a year from now, they don't want that stuff on their quarterly report just as companies going "cloud only" don't want it.