During a AWS demonstration at work. The Amazon guy specifically mentioned, AWS is a more lucrative option for large companies than small ones, simply because it was an easy one time way of culling large teams in big companies who were adding very little to nothing in return in value.

Hmm, not convinced about that.

My Boss is smart and he'd wonder what the business plan would be should say 5 years down the line you want to move away from the cloud for some reason.

You threw away decades of accumulated knowledge about the company and it's systems to save some money upfront.

He thinks on a longer scope than most bosses I've known though (largely because his family own the group so he doesn't have to answer to shareholders).

But if your business is to produce, say, cars, why would you want to maintain this knowledge in house. You certainly want to understand your systems, but do you really want to deal with physical datacentres, updating the underlying OS, replacing drives, etc. You kind of want it outsourced to specialists.

Yeah, that ought to be a great sales line.

I'd be wary about how the real world actually deals with that, but there is no lack of large companies jumping on short term costs cuts without looking at the risks.

From the point of view of upper management in a large enterprise, paying a third party with whom they have an SLA and someone to sue for infrastructure which may go down vs. paying their own staff to build and maintain the infrastructure that may go down often either isn't a difference in risk or, actually, the former seems to be better-managed risk. It's the same reason they often prefer to buy support contracts even for OSS rather than supporting it internally. Part of the analysis that probably gets overlooked from the outside is that employees aren't just a predictable cost they also are a risk.

> isn't a difference in risk

Really? People incentivised into looking for your best interests vs. a managed organization incentivised into dissolving your contract and gaining on average. I can't imagine anything that could create more different risks.

What people seem to do all the time is looking at an SLA and believing the real world must behave the way things are on paper; because there's a signature there. People do this even after being recently burned by the same partner. Some people have the same trust for in house staff, but the usual on high management is to have the exact opposite bias.

With the developed world being increasingly dependent on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, the next big fuck up is going to be interesting. We have seen multiple datacentres from the same cloud provider going offline simultaneously in the past. And it is safe to assume that hostile foreign state actors took notice of this critical dependency. Whether it is because of malice or mistakes, I can’t help thinking that this massive concentration is like a snowball increasing in size while it’s going down the slope.

Indeed. If/When another major conflict comes to the developed world, you better believe major cloud DCs will be pretty high up on the cyber and (if it comes to it) kinetic target lists. Never have so few facilities been relied upon for so much by so many.

It seems like my comment is being evaluated without proper context. Sure, some companies are moving some of their data into someone else's datacenter. Is that 50% of companies? Are they moving their core business data? Like when there's a network outage, they can't do business? When there's a partial data loss, they close their doors?

When we're talking about an entire ecosystem going away, the new one has to have almost 100% adoption. Windows desktop is going to exist for a really long time, especially when everyone else is giving up on desktops.

Those 2 statements are completely different issues.

And yes, companies are entirely moving their systems and data. Salesforce runs their sales team. Oracle and SAP runs their ERP and finance. And now AWS/Azure runs their IT infrastructure. They use email from Google or Microsoft, along with hundreds of other SaaS products used day to day by employees. New startups are even more invested and start using other vendors for every non-core activity from day one. This is what a strong global business ecosystem enables and is a massive advantage for everyone.