The multicloud approach has lost its luster, according to Andrew Plato, who founded security consultancy Zenaciti among other tech startups. “And there are high costs and lots of difficulty in switching workloads from Amazon to Azure, as an example.” He hasn’t seen any wholesale move by enterprises to repatriate their cloud servers back into their data centers. Instead, “enterprises are backing away from deploying multiple public clouds.”
So, while cutting costs is a big motivation, figuring out these costs is still a very hard problem. The tools to predict cloud costs haven’t gotten noticeably better in the past decade. Everyone’s cloud cost figures vary from month to month, just by their very nature with all the usage charging and changes to the providers’ pricing models too. As previously noted “trying to parse your monthly bill requires the skills of a CPA, a software engineer, a commodities trader and a sharp eye for the details.”
There is also what Steve Cobb, CISO at SecurityScorecard, calls “cloud sticker shock” that happens when you get your first monthly bill after turning on a new cloud app. “You don’t necessarily know what your traffic patterns will be until you build the app. They are hard to predict before you go into production with the actual data, and the shock is greater of course as you move a lot of data across cloud regions or have built in failover across providers.”