Cloud sticker shock explored: Were spending way too much
Summary
Thats the conclusion drawn by Sarah Wang and Martin Casado, partners with Silicon Valley powerhouse Andreessen Horowitz Capital Management, who say the costs of cloud on a business can be staggering. "A director of engineering at a large consumer internet company found that public cloud list prices can be 10x to 12x the cost of running ones own data centers," they relate. When it comes to assessing the costs versus benefits of cloud, the best route depends on a number of factors, says Joe Weinman, author of Cloudonomics and Digital Disciplines. "On the cost side, efficient and competent IT shops at scale with little variability or unpredictability and/or with demanding performance that benefits from a custom architecture can do it themselves," he mentioned in a tweet responding to the study. "A prominent industry CTO told us that at one of his companies, they put in short-term incentives like those used in sales, so that any engineer who saved a certain amount of cloud spend by optimizing or shutting down workloads received a spot bonus."