Why We're NOT Adopting the Most Cost-Effective Services From Our Cloud Vendores

You've heard me whitter on about the right cloud services to use in order to completely avoid the human cost of patching, monitoring, and securing your own infrastructure in the cloud. Thing is, you've heard about these technologies at some point. Phrases like:

• Platform as a Service

• PaaS & FaaS

• Functions as a Service

• Serverless

I advocate these technologies for the simple reason that they offer the lowest total cost of ownership from build through to operations over a 5 and 10-year period. And when I say lower, I mean like 90% lower. I can give example after example of this playing out in the real world.

But my customers rightly ask why I'm the only person actively promoting these technologies as the go-to for building their integrations and user experiences. Why are their cloud vendors still pushing the infrastructure option instead of these more modern services?

The answer is simple economics.

Serverless technologies are fully automated, and while they were still in their infancy around 2010, the vendors made the mistake of pricing them based on cost instead of value. They missed the fact that by using these technologies, their customers would save millions in human costs by entirely avoiding the need to hire humans in IT to do that monitoring and patching.

As an example, I've supported over 100 development, testing, and production environments for one client without a single human needed to look after any of that infrastructure. Because of that pricing decision, the cost of hosting these serverless solutions is a fraction of the cost of hosting it on infrastructure with the same cloud vendor.

For instance, a government client of mine decided for political reasons to move a solution we built for them from cloud services to cloud infrastructure. Their monthly bill for service-based (serverless) hosting was around $600/month and cost us nothing to set up, we just turned it on.

Setting up the equivalent cloud-based infrastructure cost $150,000 in technical consulting services. Once the migration was completed, their hosting costs went up from $600/month to a smidge over $50,000/month.

Think of this from the salesperson's point of view.

For my government client, the account manager made 80x more commission when they moved OFF services ONTO old-school infrastructure.

This is why none of the vendors are pushing a serverless-based approach - there's just not enough money in it for the poor salespeople.

The best way to solve this would be for the vendors to 10x the cost of their serverless services. It would still be totally viable for customers to pay that because they're still making massive savings on both hosting and human costs in the long run.

It's interesting. Ever since this light bulb went on for me, I've used every interaction with a cloud vendor to try and find a sales rep making a living off serverless services. In 5 years of searching, I've not found a single one.

But hey, this is great news for my customers, once the light bulb goes on :)