• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
Market Hill | a northdoor group company |

Market Hill | a northdoor group company |

Working on big, expensive, complicated technology problems.

  • Home
  • Market Hill in the news
    • The Library
      • Guide to Tech Value Creation
      • AWS re:Invent 2020 simplified
      • AWS Cheat Sheet
  • What you can expect
  • | Tech Product Value Creation™, by Market Hill |
  • About Market Hill
    • Our relationship with Northdoor
  • How to get in touch
  • Show Search
Hide Search

How many potatoes do you want in the cloud?

Thomas Ballard · September 25, 2020 ·

This week Google announced its ‘round the clock’ clean energy for the cloud. This came just 1 week after they announced their carbon footprint was now zero, meaning Google has compensated for all the carbon it has ever created.

This is a great start.

Deepmind, AI, Google

However, the announcement has some really interesting themes for the cloud beyond green.

70% of all enterprise cloud customers pay for but do not consume at least 3x more in the cloud that they need.

A further 10% using at least 2x more. Google’s green ambitions are in direct competition with its 5-year cloud growth plan.

Why is that the case? You could imagine it like this for example.

You ask your partner to get some potatoes for the supermarket for a recipe you are cooking. They ask “how many?”, you’d probably say 2 or 3.

What they might not ask is:

  1. How big?
  2. What type?
  3. Will you boil, bake or fry?
  4. Organic, finest?
  5. What’s the budget?

After all, they are just potatoes.

For your recipe you actually needed 1 potato, you asked for 2 or 3 and they got you 4. We believe more potatoes, more excess will surely result in even more ‘personal’ security.

Organisations do exactly the same with the cloud.

All of the cloud big players are there waiting to sell you your own comfort, your own safety net.

The problem of having too much is it can slow innovation.

Your flexibility to change as an organisation can be severely limited by long term commitments, reserved instances, cloud credits etc. These are all offered to make you more comfortable to sign a ‘big’ cloud deal.

Great companies think about creating small, flexible and portable applications in the cloud with very specific outcomes. They want a smaller cloud estate, not a bigger one.

A final thought…

An example of a real migration to AWS. This company was on the verge of signing a $100m multi-year cloud deal. Looking at the data you could very clearly that they only needed to spend in a worst-case $50m. Best-case $25m.

This would have meant less ‘personal’ security, less chance of a meeting with Andy Jassy, less of an empire.

What would you have done?


Thomas

  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn

You can sign up for more ‘unconsidered needs’ below.

Sign up now for more ‘unconsidered needs’.

Unconsidered Needs Market Hill, Private Equity, value creation

Market Hill | a northdoor group company |

· Market Hil © 2023 | a northdoor group company ·

  • Privacy Policy
We use cookies on our website. By clicking “Accept”, you consent to the use cookies.
Cookie settingsACCEPT
Privacy & Cookies Policy

Cookie Policy

Cookies

  1. A cookie consists of information sent by a web server to a web browser and stored by the browser. The information is then sent back to the server each time the browser requests a page from the server. This enables the webserver to identify and track the web browser.

  2. We may use “session” cookies, “persistent” and “Google advertising” cookies on the website. We will use the session cookies to: keep track of you whilst you navigate the website. We will use the persistent cookies to: enable our website to recognise you when you visit. We will use Google advertising cookies to collect data about your traffic and identifiers, also to link activity across devices and measure conversion events but it is done in a way that does not personally identify you.

  3. We use Google Analytics to analyse the use of this website. Google Analytics generates statistical and other information about website use by means of cookies, which are stored on users’ computers. The information generated relating to our website is used to create reports about the use of the website. Google will store this information. Google’s privacy policy is available at: http://www.google.com/privacypolicy.html.


Disabling cookies

You can typically remove or reject cookies via your browser settings. In order to do this, follow the instructions provided by your browser (usually located within the “settings,” “help” “tools” or “edit” facility). Many browsers are set to accept cookies until you change your settings.
Further information about cookies, including how to see what cookies have been set on your computer or mobile device and how to manage and delete them, visit www.allaboutcookies.org and www.youronlinechoices.com.uk.

Conversion / Tracking pixels

We pay for advertising from marketing partners on other sites, for example, Facebook/LinkedIn. These third parties sometimes require that we put a tiny image (“pixel”) from their site on any landing pages that users might arrive at. These pixels can create cookies for the third party so we can work with them to understand how successful their marketing campaign was. We also need to understand where a user came from, so that, if the user goes on to sign up on our Website, we can pay the correct marketing partner for their service. This website uses retargeting services from the social network LinkedIn. LinkedIn collects certain information via cookies to determine which web pages are visited. This data is then used to associate your browser with demographic categories, and serve LinkedIn ads based on your past visits to this website. Please note that any information collected by LinkedIn via cookies is not linked to any customer’s personal information collected by us.
Necessary
Always Enabled
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Non-necessary
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
SAVE & ACCEPT