Day Two Cloud 190: Serious Public Clouds Invest In Infrastructure With Charles Fitzgerald
Apr 12, 2023
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CapEx obsessive Charles Fitzgerald shares insights on evaluating public cloud investments, discussing capex significance in assessing cloud companies and investment trends of major providers. The future of Google Cloud Platform is analyzed, along with opportunities and challenges of edge computing. The impact of cloud vendors on cloud architects and engineers is explored, emphasizing the need to understand vendor investments and capex numbers in assessing reliability and competitiveness.
Analyzing CapEx spending is crucial for assessing cloud vendors' commitment and reliability.
Smaller cloud providers face challenges in competing with the scale and investments of major players like AWS, Azure, and GCP.
Deep dives
The Significance of CapEx as a Measure of Cloud Providers' Investment
CapEx, short for capital expenditures, plays a crucial role in determining the seriousness of cloud providers. Companies that demonstrate significant increases in CapEx spending indicate a strong investment in their cloud infrastructure, such as data centers, servers, and networking gear. By analyzing CapEx numbers, engineers can assess a cloud vendor's commitment and reliability. For instance, IBM's declining CapEx spending over the years is an indicator of a lack of investment and potential unreliability. Therefore, considering CapEx is vital for practitioners evaluating cloud vendors.
The Inability of Small Providers to Compete with Big Cloud Giants
Smaller cloud providers face an uphill battle when it comes to challenging the dominance of major players like AWS, Azure, and GCP. The scale, capabilities, and investments made by the big three are simply unmatched. While there may be potential opportunities for niche markets or specific use cases, attempting to compete head-on is an unrealistic endeavor. The massive CapEx investments of the leading cloud providers, which amount to hundreds of billions of dollars, make it extremely difficult for smaller companies to catch up in terms of infrastructure and services.
The Edge Market and Its Limited Impact on the Big Cloud Players
Despite the buzz surrounding edge computing and smaller edge-focused companies, their impact on major cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and GCP remains limited. While the edge presents niche opportunities, the scale, capabilities, and ecosystem of the hyperclouds are hard to match. The big players already have significant edge footprints through offerings like CDNs, Azure Stack, and Outposts. Startups and smaller providers in the edge market may find it challenging to differentiate themselves and resist the entry of the major cloud providers into their space.
Misconceptions and Limited Scope of Cloud Repatriation
The notion of cloud repatriation, where companies bring workloads back from the cloud to on-premises or private data centers, is often overhyped and lacks substantial evidence. While there are some examples of companies exploring repatriation, it has not become a widespread trend. Data center providers like Equinix and Digital Realty have not experienced significant growth as a result of repatriation, indicating its limited impact. The financial and strategic trade-offs involved in repatriation, along with the ongoing innovation demands, make it a less compelling option for many companies. Cloud optimization, rather than repatriation, is often a more suitable approach.
On today's Day Two Cloud we dive into how the public clouds spend their money and what IT and engineering folks can learn from those spending patterns. We also look at the notion of cloud repatriation and how prevalent (or not) it is. Our guest is Charles Fitzgerald, a CapEx obsessive who writes the Platformonomics blog.
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