An argument that is often only made by folks who didn't ran anything at scale on a public cloud. If you've ever set in a room when a cloud deal was signed, you'd know it cable: you don't get to pay less by threatening to switch providers (I've seen people try to suggest that and get laughed out of the room), but by buying more from a single one.
Hence accident forgiveness is in the same marketing bucket as free credits for new customers: reducing the aversion to trying the cloud and putting more work on it.
And the switching costs, the biggest line item isn't building for multiple clouds (you can't be cloud agnostic: abstractions always leak somewhere, so you need to select a set of specific clouds to build for), but the cost of moving data between clouds. That's the real lock-in.
In the IBM, HP days it wasn’t about paying less per se by threatening to switch providers, it was getting more concessions (of which money might be one). Some big companies had both systems so they could play them off of each other. Time to order more hardware, who will kiss our butts more?
I’d be very surprised if that doesn’t still exist for the big boys. Though most of us are not big boys, and half of the biggest boys are cloud providers themselves.
We all pay more [sic] so data centers would be over provisioned, allowing quickly expansion when we need it. I’ve been in a few incident that were root caused to a cloud provider lacking capacity to provision more instances.
As that over capacity would’ve been bought and installed in the cloud provider’s data centers regardless of the errors that are being forgiven, not billing for those errors is a net gain to the provider, at minuscule cost, if at all, to other users.
Hence accident forgiveness is in the same marketing bucket as free credits for new customers: reducing the aversion to trying the cloud and putting more work on it.
And the switching costs, the biggest line item isn't building for multiple clouds (you can't be cloud agnostic: abstractions always leak somewhere, so you need to select a set of specific clouds to build for), but the cost of moving data between clouds. That's the real lock-in.