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Comment by _b | Hacker News Reader

Cloud providers raising prices is unsettling. Teams invest many person-years into building software on top of cloud services assuming certain prices. There is a lot of lock in there. Although it is hard to predict to what extent they will pass along future cost savings, or if new cheaper options will come available, it has been safe to assume they won't jack up prices on any given workload.

By violating that trust, it will make teams wary of building on top of Google's higher-level services where there is the most lock-in, which unfortunately for Google, is also where the highest margins are.

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> Teams invest many person-years into building software on top of cloud services assuming certain prices & cost structures.

part of the implicit risk in using someone else's computers

on the bright side, when a large provider changes conditions, similarly run competition will also see their costs rise

other competition that took a safer, perhaps more expensive path, will now be more competitive

> part of the implicit risk in using someone else's computers

I have not followed this space for almost a decade now but I assume that on-premise costs have also gone up in the last couple of years. They had to do that in order to compensate for the higher energy costs (especially here in Europe) and for the higher employees-related costs (even though those costs might be easing right now).

On the other hand I do not know how the higher cloud costs compare to the (presumably) higher on-premise costs in terms of percentages.

Quick, grab your Pikachu faces! This never happened before in the tech industry! I'm just sorry for all those people happily waving their certifications on LinkedIn.

> it has been safe to assume they won't jack up prices on any given workload.

Has it been?

Yup. AWS never raises prices, assuming one ignores that one time they added the per-transaction fee to S3 shortly after launch, but I think everyone thought was a rather understandable change.

Conventional wisdom is that AWS is more reliable to trust to build on top of. My interactions buying cloud services is that the AWS account managers are more trustworthy and reliable (although they spend less time building personal rapport and small talk). And this kind of thing just confirms that.

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