Obscured by clouds: Time for IaaS vendors to come clean and play fair

It had to happen. Amazon and Microsoft are under investigation for distorting the UK's public infrastructure cloud market following complaints to internet regulator Ofcom that have now been passed on to the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). cloud Amazon, Microsoft under UK regulator's eye as cloud market probe …

[Amblyopius]

Packets DO cost more to move one way than the other

In the last 30 years or so that I've been dealing with this we've never reached that magical point where egress and ingress for anyone was balanced (and I would generally consider that impossible anyway). If you are in services, you scale on egress. If you're dealing with end users, you scale on ingress. If the pipe does both, you'll quickly know which one is the most demanding and yes that makes the other direction essentially "free". Given the services they host, these providers are spending on egress so that's what they charge customers for.

As to multi-cloud: mostly in the software. Hardly any of it is truly an infrastructure issue. With some abstraction layers it's easy enough but like it has been for decades: write crappy software and then expect the infrastructure people to magically make it resilient, portable ... Works just fine if you don't take that route and it's not up to the Cloud Provider to make that decision for you, they are not developing your software.

Maybe AWS has a point? Market seems to be misunderstood indeed.

[Lurko]

Re: Packets DO cost more to move one way than the other

The market is certainly misunderstood by buyers. It's always been the case that when buying IT, corporate buyers don't look hard enough to understand what the vendor's business model is, what the likely cost of these services is to the vendor, where the margin comes from, and what's hidden or covered by hideous "non standard service request" charges. The buyers also don't contract IT often enough, so there's massive asymmetry of expertise between buyer and seller (which isn't helped by paying procurement consultants, I'm afraid), there's the huge, huge danger of the procurement team being undermined by some agreement on a C-suite handshake, which is a tactice the sales people know well. And the buyers think that a "best endeavours" clause is adequate when it comes to re-sourcing the service.

Ultimately, most businesses are easy prey for tech sales teams, who know that for every little omission or oversight by the buyer, the cash register will jingle long and merrily. And the final nail in the buyer's coffin is that the procurement team is (compared to the sales team) underpaid, underpowered, and driven by few incentives.

[Killfalcon]

Re: Packets DO cost more to move one way than the other

For a lot of companies, going to the cloud is like the average person buying their first house. They know it's expensive, has risks, and will involve a lot of fees, but they don't know which fees are normal, or which risks are credible.

[Doctor Syntax]

"Microsoft's decades-long lead"

Perhaps this should be a hint to regulators to take an immediate interest as soon as Microsoft does anything new.

[Michael Strorm]

USA! USA! USA! ("Upton Sinclair Applies")

> Oh, and Amazon? That "fundamental misunderstanding" of the market? It's not us. It's you.

To paraphrase Upton Sinclair, it is difficult to get a corporation to understand something when their excessive profits depend on their not understanding it.

Or shove the obligatory Mandy Rice-Davies quote in there instead.

[Arthur the cat]

Obscured by clouds

Nice Pink Floyd reference for us grey(white?)beards.

[Dizzy Dwarf]

Re: Obscured by clouds

Yep, one of their best. Perfect on Sunday mornings.

[Pete 2]

The memories of a man in his old age ... are now in the cloud

> Obscured by clouds

With a rather prescient line from 51 years ago wrt cloud computing

Mind how you go, I can tell you 'cos I know, you may find it hard to get off

[FirstTangoInParis]

Lessons identified

Perhaps prospective users should be required to read Little Red Riding Hood again. “Oh what lovely clouds you have, Grandma!”. “All the better to make uncle Jeff richer!”