Thread by @lindydonna

Whenever there's a new S-1 from a company preparing for IPO, the reaction is invariably, "woah! the cloud is expensive." At scale, everything is expensive. (1/n)

Let's talk about companies that predated the cloud. Remember when you'd log in to a site and it would be "down for maintenance"? (2/n)

If you worked in tech before the cloud, do you remember how long you had to wait for new hardware? For younger generations: it was measured in MONTHS, not minutes. (3/n)

Businesses had a huge IT staff, who had to do tape backups, have pagers, and do a bunch of random disaster recovery work. (4/n)

And the quality of service was terrible. Like, less than two nines, terrible. But it didn't matter that much, because you could take your site down for maintenance. (5/n)

And customers didn't really have alternatives. There wasn't as much competition in the market. (6/n)

The companies that are filing for IPO now, would not even EXIST without the cloud. Before they could find product-market fit, they would have to rent rack space and spend engineers on low-level infrastructure (7/n)

So, when cloud vendors say, "the cloud is cheap," they mean, "the cloud is cheap compared to the alternative." You get 4 or 5 nines of availability, you have an ecosystem of partners, and you can find engineers who can run it. (8/n)

Would you rather buy your own rack space and manage it, patch the OS, and find security issues? Or would you rather trust a cloud vendor who is doing it at scale and knows how to optimize? (9/n)

And yes OF COURSE there are opportunities to reduce costs. But the right answer is (almost) never "do it yourself with a private cloud." (10/n)

Let me ask you this: would you be excited to use Lyft if the app was unavailable from, say, 2-3am? Because it was "down for maintenance"? (11/n)

Would you trust Pinterest with your carefully curated Pinboards if you couldn't access it 1% of the time? (12/n)

The cloud doesn't always reduce your bottom line. But it sure as hell improves your top line. Instead of doing random things that AREN'T your core competency, you can outsource to a vendor who's on the hook for your underlying infrastructure. (13/n)

So YOU can focus on your unique business value. So that YOU can pay your engineers to add new customer-facing features, instead of fiddling with data centers and cables and internet connectivity. (14/n)

My cellphone bill is expensive. So's my smartphone. But I'm not going to go back to a landline and a cordless phone, even though they're "cheaper." (fin)