> “Sorry, we don’t have the money” is a much better negotiating position than “can we please have our money back?”
I agree but why would you like to be in either position anyway? The so-called cloud services are terribly overpriced when compared to traditional servers.
Not really, computing done correctly is about avoiding all of the pitfalls and finding ways to get zero cost benefits, free computation out of necessary redundancy, etc. Selling cloud computing is about creating options around every pitfall and finding ways to charge for every mitigation that will be necessary and charge for redundancy in the mitigation strategy for the mitigation strategy..
Even if you pay for all the redundant managed blah they offer to not lose your business by having any single point of technical failure in their network, their billing and IAM are your single points of failure, if you diversify to multiple clouds all the guarantees either cloud offers is now pointless redundancy so you are paying 10X pricing for an inadequate redundancy layer.
If you look at Google's own model for computing, they didn't fall for this themselves, the computers they used were intentionally unreliable to not recursively pay for reliability and redundancy at any layer that can't provide the needed guarantee.
You can basically go all in with one of these clouds and become a franchise add-on with roughly the same rights as your average mcdonald's store owner, or you are managing a strategy that is far more complex because of the complexity of these offerings than just using metal and free software.
They're very useful if you're testing a concept, need agile scaling of computational power, or are just starting a service and don't want to / can't invest the capital in dedicated hardware. I agree with you on your last point though, making your service entirely dependent on these services makes you little more than a franchise and is a potential vulnerability if you ever compete with any important existing service. It probably isn't a good idea for a mature or rapidly maturing business to rely heavily on these services.
I agree but why would you like to be in either position anyway? The so-called cloud services are terribly overpriced when compared to traditional servers.