> d)while this may give you long term negotiating power, you will likely just save more money with long term exclusive contracts.
Uh, This would be true, if one expected prices (and technology) to remain stable, but since that isn't the case, maintaining re-negotiating power is quite a bit more advantageous than you imply.
Yeah not sure. I think it depends on the contracts. Maintaining infrastructure on 3 cloud providers that don’t work the same is costly.
All of these services provide pretty steep discounts (as a percentage of original costs) for customers who are able to provide accurate capacity forecasts and make long term commitments.
And the while the “technology gets cheaper” argument is true, I believe it is generally understood that while AWS/Azure/Google can use this trend at the scale they operate at (and then pass the savings to the customers), most cloud customers would spend more money hiring additional engineers to maintain more complicated infrastructure then they would save trying to take advantage of this trend.
> Maintaining infrastructure on 3 cloud providers that don’t work the same is costly.
Maintaining the ability to move between providers is not at all the same as maintaining your systems on all three simultaneously.
> All of these services provide pretty steep discounts (as a percentage of original costs) for customers who are able to [...] make long term commitments.
Sure. But the question is, at the end of that commitment, are you locked in to that provider by the cost of having to redevelop for a different provider (which gives your existing provider an unearned pricing advantage), or can you switch providers because you had the foresight to make sure your deployments were portable?
> most cloud customers would spend more money hiring additional engineers to maintain more complicated infrastructure then they would save trying to take advantage of this trend.
Sure, because most cloud customers are small and are drawn by the prospect of not maintaining infrastructure at all (in other words, they're actually SaaS customers by preference), and the non-portability of G-Suite's integration with GCP as compared with Office 365's integration with Azure is relatively immarterial compared to the non-portability between G-Suite and Office 365.
But (right now, at least) at the scale where you are for example selecting a cloud orchestration solution, going for the one that provides better portability between different providers with an abstraction layer doesn't really impose additional costs (because you'll need to develop internal expertise in whatever solution you choose).
Uh, This would be true, if one expected prices (and technology) to remain stable, but since that isn't the case, maintaining re-negotiating power is quite a bit more advantageous than you imply.