Several outages the past several weeks on Amazon Web Services (AWS) demonstrated how critical "the cloud" has become for business and society.
Could cloud computing services be the electricity of the 21st century?
The services are being used to expand companies' computing capacity without them having to buy their own equipment. But outages are testing potential weaknesses.
By Isaac Cheifetz
January 8, 2022 at 2:00PM
A recent article in the Economist on the state of cloud computing dug in depth on the competitive landscape of the cloud. Startups are spending a large percentage of their funding, often a majority, on cloud computing, due to the ease of use of adding computing power for growing businesses with a mouse click, rather than the old style of buying and configuring additional physical servers.
In this, the Economist said, the cloud is becoming to our economy what electricity became a century ago: the foundation of advanced work, with as-needed computational availability, just as electricity became available from utilities on an as-need basis.
The principal cloud providers are Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. AWS and Azure are the dominant market players, with Google rapidly growing as well.
Many others are competing. Oracle, for example, is expanding its offering and looking to make it central to its health care platform, now that it has acquired electronic health records giant Cerner.
The cloud ecosystem also is composed of management systems that complement the cloud providers used for functions such as optimizing the flow and pricing of information on and off platforms like AWS and Azure.
The AWS outages of the past month, though infrequent, once again raise the question of whether it is in the economy and society's best interest to have several giant vendors controlling such a critical function of the economy.
As usual, there are antitrust issues here as well. AWS, for example, would be an obvious target if Amazon is eventually seriously challenged by the government to split up.
Secondarily, if cloud computing is becoming the electricity of the 21st century, should the vendors be treated as a regulated utility rather than an independent for-profit business? My first reaction is that regulating the cloud like electricity would inhibit innovation.
But that supports the argument of not letting these vendors become too big. After all, utilities are regulated because they are de-facto monopolies.
Isaac Cheifetz, a Twin Cities executive recruiter, can be reached through catalytic1.com.
about the writer
Isaac Cheifetz
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