The cost of cloud, a trillion dollar paradox
These people don&#x27;t see the real value proposition of the cloud. The value is not in &quot;scaling when you need to&quot;. Sure, that can be very handy. But that is not what 99% of companies are getting out of the cloud 99% of the time.<p>If you self-manage, your capital investment is initially higher, and lower over time. At the same time, the effort it takes to reach the same results is <i>always</i> higher, and the quality of the end product <i>may</i> be lower, depending on how much service quality affects your product.<p>If you pay for managed services, your initial investment is lower, and higher over time. But at the same time, you require less effort, and you get higher quality outcomes.<p>This is obvious to anyone who has worked in the industry and done both. First, host your own service: JFrog Artifactory, Atlassian Confluence, GitLab, whatever. Now rapidly increase the demands on this service. As demand rises, quality will decrease, because it takes a lot of time, effort and expertise to build a very reliable hosted service. Now switch to a managed cloud instance. Suddenly, the service&#x27;s average quality increases. Performance is steady regardless of increase in use. There are virtually no interruptions to your product or development.<p>The impact of a service&#x27;s quality and reliability has ripple effects. If poor service quality slows down development, that means development quality will go down as people cut corners to try and meet deadlines. If the service is used for production, it means your product&#x27;s quality will suffer, and that effects your bottom line. So a huge amount of the actual cost is not just paying for a service, but also how much business value is generated or lost due to service quality.<p>There is simply no way to replicate a managed service without becoming a managed service provider yourself. You have to become a whole new business within a business. It&#x27;s like a yogurt company also becoming a dairy farm. Running a farm is not easy, and you will screw it up for several years. Seems obvious for farming, but for some reason people always underestimate this when it comes to technology.<p>On paper, the Cloud&#x27;s value proposition is scalability. But in practice, the true value is actually as a force-multiplier for your product&#x27;s quality, reliability, and time to market. (Time to market not just being &quot;I launched my startup&quot; but also &quot;I released this new feature before my competitor&quot;)