Cloud as a Utility

I’ve often commented that I believe cloud providers are the next utility of our time. This seems hard to believe at the moment. Incredulous even. Not surprisingly I guess, many disagree with me. The cloud companies are the biggest innovators and technical bastions of the modern age right? Trillion-dollar behemoths. 

Then again, so were telecoms companies not so long ago.

I believe we’ve had signs that confirm this slow but certain shift. AWS has decommissioned a number of services and this is a good thing! 

AWS has also, very quietly and incredibly reluctantly, started to accept that some customers may be multi cloud. AWS no less, the cloud vendor that virtually denies the existence of other clouds!

And of course, the recent carnage caused by Crowdstrike can have a way of focusing people’s minds on their exposure to a single vendor. Maybe not always the customer’s mind, but certainly that of the regulator. Banking, airlines, medical all got hit. What do you think the regulators of those industries are going to be doing? Financial services regulators have for some years been pushing banks to solve what is referred to as concentration risk, i.e. the problem of having all your compute delivered by a single vendor and what happens if they can’t. I doubt the Crowdstrike incident gave them a warm fuzzy feeling inside.

So what? Multiple clouds then! Ah but you see, as I’m sure AWS knows only too well, going from single cloud to multi cloud is a lot of engineering effort. Being multi cloud and picking to use one more than the other is the turn of a dial. 

Once you can do that… well you’re not far from being swapped in and out like an electricity provider.