The title is optional. And possibly a giraffe.
This is a feature, not a bug. Oracle Microsoft Amazon don't have customers, they have hostages.
Mine's the one with the empty wallet -->
AWS has a reputation for ratcheting up prices as customers migrate more workloads to its sprawling rack empire – but a bunch of UK users endured a sphincter-tightening moment today when they checked their bill. Reg reader Alec Hendry, who manages digital platforms and a "bunch of crazy video stuff" for MTV, said he was …
@AC Azure fan: put down the Koolaid for a moment and revisit that. If you want to get away from any particular cloud vendor, whether Amazon, Microsoft or otherwise, you are screwed. Whether it's on-prem or hosted is irrelevant to that argument.
@Anonymous Coward: "But it's nearly zero work in comparison to move from say Azure to Azure stack on premise....Good luck ever exiting AWS if you use it!"
How about moving from Azure-stack-on-premise to a standalone system, next to impossible, from what I've seen. But then again I figure that's a major part of the strategy. One Cloud to rule them all and in the darkness bind them. Something dotNET was less successful at doing.
Azure-stack-on-premise: The 'cloud' didn't deliver so you'll have to replace all the hardware you threw out with 'azure stack on premise' and rent it back from us into perpetuity. And you'll have to replace all the old-style sysops with 'azure solution architects' 'azure administrators' and DevOps .. er .. developer operations .. developers :)
It depends on what you are doing - if you are relying on auto-scaling features it would be very hard to replicate without spending a shedload on standby hardware. And the associated personnel to maintain it all. For quite a few online-only businesses, that delta is their profit margin.
That said, anyone using AWS or any other provider would do well to architect their backends to they can be moved between providers...
Give it a few years, and this is what cloud services *will* be costing. Once they've got you - they've really got you. Prices will soar as companies who thought it was a good idea at the beginning finally start to realize that moving everything to the cloud is bankrupting them. I'm just waiting for BAAS - Bankruptcy as a Service!
What happened is that they invoiced their customers to the tax that they should have been paying on their profits. Somebody referenced the wrong cell in a spreadsheet and applied the full tax, not the tax that they negotiated after passing the money through half a dozen virtual countries on the way to the bank.