Cloud budgets balloon out of control. And, did a cloud rivalry just get personal?
Topline: Is the cloud budget bubble about to burst?
How’s your company’s wallet feeling these days? Not so good if you ask the 40% of companies that overspent on cloud last year. Even before COVID-19 drove overspending, more than two-thirds of users expected to blow their 2020 cloud budgets. One major reason? Complexity. Tracking and controlling spend on an array of cloud computing services can be almost as complex as the technology itself. Now companies are getting creative to combat soaring costs. Pinterest—which owes AWS $3.2 billion over the next eight years—has appointed “spend captains” to oversee how much cloud it’s using to cut down on costs when possible. “Our cloud bill is huge, so at some point you start thinking, ‘Hey, could I save money on these dollar amounts?’” explains Jeremy King, Pinterest’s head of engineering.
By the numbers:
With cloud gaming slated to come to Xbox this holiday season, market research firm Newzoo forecasts that the market will reach 23.7 million paying users and generate a whopping $1.6 billion in revenue this year. “Similar to the broader games market, COVID-19 helped accelerate the adoption of cloud gaming. However, there is more to cloud gaming’s growth than just the temporary effects of the pandemic,” says Guilherme Fernandes, a market consultant at Newzoo.
What you need to know:
“Killed by Google” is back from the dead, apparently. Just weeks after promising to stop abruptly ending services, Google just shut down its entire healthcare tech unit. The unit was formed in 2018 but caught ire for a controversial cloud deal involving patient data, alongside other missteps that led to its shuttering despite Google’s recent vows to be more transparent about ending services.
Amal Hussein, Engineering Lead, Bocoup (@nomadtechie): Dear dev teams: If you are not Amazon, please don’t try to architect your apps as if though you need to support that type of scale. Keep your architecture simple. Trust me. The maintenance burden alone will crush you. Time wasted solving problems you don’t have hurts your users.
Matt Asay, Head of Developer Marketing, Amazon AWS (@mjasay): Thoughtful, interesting post from @QuinnyPig on the need for cloud companies to move beyond service primitives to service solutions (or, put more bluntly, making cloud less “some assembly required” and more turnkey)
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