> They dragged the entire company into AWS,

And why/how is that a good thing?

I think if you rephrase it that they "dragged the whole company out of the particular IT hell that is associated with banks owning, running and procuring infrastructure" it probably makes more sense.

I interned there a couple years ago. It was nice to use tech that was more standardized than proprietary / internal so that the skills were easily transferable.

From a business perspective it takes you out of the business of managing your own infrastructure. Even at big tech now we have to decide between managing our own infrastructure and “outsourcing” it to a managed service. Most advice I’ve gotten encourages the latter. It can cost more but if cost isn’t prohibitive it frees you up to deliver features and value for customers because you no longer have to develop (as much) expertise in ops.

I get that and that is the selling point of the cloud and it makes total sense for some workloads like ML/Data Science.

However, once you move the companies infra to AWS (or any one cloud provider) and shutdown your infra, in due course AWS will keep increasing your price by x% every year. At the point you don't have a choice but to pay those price increases yoy. You have much less bargaining power.

I think hybrid cloud is the best way to go. You have lot of bargaining power and no one provider can hold you hostage.

Agree that strategically lock in is a concern, but getting on AWS at least removes the inertia of moving to cloud. It’s probably much easier to go from on prem to cloud to multicloud than on prem to multicloud directly - especially at the time C1 started the migration.

> However, once you move the companies infra to AWS (or any one cloud provider) and shutdown your infra, in due course AWS will keep increasing your price by x% every year. At the point you don't have a choice but to pay those price increases yoy. You have much less bargaining power.

I think you’re leaving out a key restraint: AWS is quite profitable now but has strong competitors and there’s still a much larger amount of IT spending which isn’t going to any cloud provider. If they abuse one customer, a ton of money is going to race to the exit. It’s also hard to see how they could raise prices enough to cancel out all of that lost future business without attracting regulatory attention, too — rearchitecting isn’t trivial but you’re still talking on the order of a year to profit before you’re not only losing the profits you had but also all of the future growth.

The other thing to consider is the substantially greater cost of a hybrid cloud: not just the obvious costs of extra resources, ops, security, training, application support, etc. but also the opportunity costs of restricting your usage to the lowest-common denominator cloud features. That’s a heavy cost to pay every month as a hedge against a low-probability event — I highly doubt that you’d lose money betting that you’d save so much money by using a single cloud that you’d still come out ahead if you had to migrate later.

There is a major cost of switching cloud providers, which means it’s less of an efficient market than it could be. Since all of the costs are transparent AWS knows how much more they can charge while still being cheaper than switching. Push the break even point far enough out and few companies will even consider switching.

And that doesn’t even get into the technical side of it, which is a logistical nightmare as you mentioned with multicloud. (I don’t even want to think about it for my personal projects!) If C1 has around 50k years of AWS experience among all its tech employees, it will take a long time to match that in Azure or GCP.

Switching costs are non-trivial but I would also keep in mind just how valuable “we don’t raise prices” is to AWS for getting businesses to adopt them. In practice that means they don’t lower prices as quickly when the underlying costs decrease but an awful lot of CIOs prefer that to volatility.

When the market is closer to saturation that could change but I think that’s going to hold for at least a decade or two: there is considerably more money being spent on traditional data centers than in the cloud and I’m sure they’re trying to give as few disincentives as possible to those potential customers.

Get a job at any other bank that's been around since the 1980s and you'll know why that's a good thing.