In your cost comparison are you including headcount to maintain all of that infrastructure? Security? And the equivalent of multi zone redundancy? Scale headroom?
When Azure blew up it did so because it was cheaper, much cheaper, not so much because of the features it offered. They are nice, but for a lot of industries you sort of can’t use them because it’s a bureaucratic nightmare to upkeep the required exit plans if you do too much vendor lock-in. For some industries this isn’t an issue, but for many EU enterprise organisations it is. So anyway, the big cloud was cheaper, but since it’s been raising cost pretty steadily, and, because all those hardware houses lost customers and the survivors became cheaper, the scale has now tipped.
As far as operations go on the software side, I’m not sure the headcount is that different. We frankly tend to buy that from third party companies anyway, but the pricing difference isn’t too different between whatever you want to do. I’m personally a fan of doing it with your own staff, but it’s just such a challenge because your IT budget isn’t going to be big enough to do in a way that is resistant to people finding new jobs. The third party agencies don’t have this issue because they sell things like networking to a bunch of organisations, so it’s not just one or two guys for them like it would be if we did it ourselves.
But yeah. Big cloud operational costs are getting to where it makes absolutely no sense to use them, all costs included. When we draw up plans for hardware we have extra budget for when some net controller fails 5 years before it’s supposed to, that sort of detail. Otherwise you can’t make an informed decision. Judging by the local tech environment here in Denmark, we’re frankly even going to be late to the party of leaving big cloud because of costs. Likely because we weren’t using it too heavily in the first place.
I fully expect that the pendulum is eventually going up swing back. It’s not like we’re stopping our contracts on Office365 or Windows licenses anytime soon, and eventually we’re going to get offered the same sweet package deals that landed us in Azure and not in AWS to begin with. But for the next 5-10 years I think a lot of EU based non-tech orgs are going to leave big cloud over cost.