I am still holding my breath for the tools to mature to the point that people can run their own data centers again with less overhead. My lips are getting a little blue but I see some hopeful signs.

For number 2 especially, there have been some cool projects for efficiency gains when different parts of the organization experience different traffic spikes. Like Netflix, where transcoding spikes precede viewing spikes, and they pulled off a load balancing coup to reduce peak instances.

I think the right thing for a tech company to do is to run their own data center in at least one town where they operate, and use cloud services for geographic distribution and load shedding.

The temptation to reduce your truck numbers below long term sustainable rates is too great, and so is lock-in. The best hunt I think you can do for the long term health of your companies these days is to hold cloud infrastructure at arm’s length. Participate, but strongly encourage choosing technologies that could be run in your own server rooms of another cloud provider. Like Kafka, Kube, and readily available database solutions. Make them avoid the siren song of the proprietary solutions. We have already forgotten the vendor lock-in lessons of the 90’s.