Even as an Anti-Cloud ( Or more accurately Anti-everything Cloud ) person I still think there are many benefits to cloud. Just most of the them are over sold and people dont need it.
Number one is company bureaucracy and politics. No one wants to beg another person or department, go on endless meetings just to have extra hardware provisioned. For engineers that alone is worth perhaps 99% of all current cloud margins.
Number two is also company bureaucracy and politics. CFOs dont like CapX. Turning it into OpeX makes things easier for them. Along with end of year company budget turning into Cloud credits for different departments. Especially for companies with government fundings.
Number three is really company bureaucracy and politics. Dealing with either Google, AWS and Microsoft meant you no longer have to deal with dozens of different vendors from on server, networking hardware, software licenses etc. Instead it is all pre-approved into AWS, GCP or Azure. This is especially useful for things that involves Government contracts or fundings.
There are also things like instant worldwide deployment. You can have things up and running in any regions within seconds. And useful when you have site that gets 10 to 1000x the normal traffic from time to time.
But then a lot of small business dont have these sort of issues. Especially non-consumer facing services. Business or SaaS are highly unlikely to get 10x more customers within short period of time.
I continue to wish there is a middle ground somewhere. You rent dedicated server for cheap as base load and use cloud for everything else.
Number one is company bureaucracy and politics. No one wants to beg another person or department, go on endless meetings just to have extra hardware provisioned. For engineers that alone is worth perhaps 99% of all current cloud margins.
Number two is also company bureaucracy and politics. CFOs dont like CapX. Turning it into OpeX makes things easier for them. Along with end of year company budget turning into Cloud credits for different departments. Especially for companies with government fundings.
Number three is really company bureaucracy and politics. Dealing with either Google, AWS and Microsoft meant you no longer have to deal with dozens of different vendors from on server, networking hardware, software licenses etc. Instead it is all pre-approved into AWS, GCP or Azure. This is especially useful for things that involves Government contracts or fundings.
There are also things like instant worldwide deployment. You can have things up and running in any regions within seconds. And useful when you have site that gets 10 to 1000x the normal traffic from time to time.
But then a lot of small business dont have these sort of issues. Especially non-consumer facing services. Business or SaaS are highly unlikely to get 10x more customers within short period of time.
I continue to wish there is a middle ground somewhere. You rent dedicated server for cheap as base load and use cloud for everything else.