There is a skill that I think DBAs and sysadmins will need to develop: cloud cost analysis. I’ve thought this was important for quite a few years, and I’ve been (unsuccessfully) lobbying for cost information to be gathered and analyzed in Redgate Monitor. Hopefully, this work will get done soon, as I see more companies asking their technical people to provide analysis and justification of the resources being billed for in the cloud.
Basecamp analyzed its costs in 2023 and decided it could save money by leaving the cloud. I’ve seen other companies decide they were saving money in the cloud. Many, however, are likely unsure of the total return they get compared to the costs of cloud computing. I have seen some posts (like this one) that try to help you get a handle on your costs, but there is often a lot of complexity in cloud costs when multiple departments have different accounts (AWS) or subscriptions (Azure) with a provider.
In many ways, I think the large cloud vendors haven’t really considered how to support large enterprises that need a lot of resources, a lot of different administrators, and a wide variety of ways to both secure those resources as well as aggregate billing. I know we have an Azure account I didn’t create, where I have very limited rights to do things, but I can access some resources. However, my group has an AWS account that appears to be sending us billing statements instead of our corporate finance group.
What can be even more difficult to understand is that applications using the cloud might want a complete picture of billing, but various different technical groups might be responsible for the different parts of the system. Data services could be managed separately from web servers or application servers, with different groups creating, configuring, and destroying them as the needs change. Billing, however, be something accountants would want to separate by function/area/application, not group. Knowing all data services for all databases cost $xx/month is different than knowing the retail website (containing web servers, databases, and networking charges) costs $yy/month.
This is far different from the days when one group was responsible for most of our computing resources. Often we had a group of IT staffers who managed hardware, ordered it, and could link costs of different machines to a specific application or department. Now we often don’t have a central group who is even aware of all the resources that the company has provisioned.
I suspect this will mean that many more technical people will not only be asked to account for the cloud resources being used, but also split out those costs in different ways, allowing people in finance departments to aggregate the different costs from the various technical groups. I don’t know who will actually track network resources, but I suspect applications will often have this data included with the servers or services that access public networks.
Controlling costs and carefully removing unnecessary or unused resources is going to be a continual problem in the cloud. I suspect that quite a few data professionals are going to be integral to helping manage this, especially for dev/test systems that are easily forgotten about over time.
Steve Jones
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Voice of the DBA 
It’s time for companies to realize that the cloud isn’t the solution for everyone. Just as with offshoring 20 years earlier the Cloud was marketed as being everyone’s answer to lower costs and convivence but it’s not that way for all. That said it is the sales & marketing teams job to convince people to purchase their services so like with any sales you know they are going to exaggerate but in the case of the Cloud it was more like a cross company organized campaign, a global push Not only are their costs to consider but there are legal issues and security to keep in mind. It matters not what kind of contract you have or how much you are paying the cloud provider, they will always place their needs and security first so if the US Federal Government comes knocking demanding information that they may or may not legally have a right to but pressure the cloud provider anyway that provider is not going to try and protect your data the way you would if it were on premise. This may seem trivial to some but there are plenty of businesses that would put up a fight over something like that. The Cloud also enables the Feds to do this in a way that the Business is entirely unaware of it because the provider has been served with a National Security letter which makes it a Federal crime for teh provider to inform the client that some of their data has been shared with the Fed. If a business was not using the cloud then the Feds would have to go to the business to demand whatever data it is they are looking for and in that scenario they can’t prevent the business from knowing about it. In the cloud however this can and has happened.
There’s a lot to consider with using the cloud in addition to the costs and just as with offshoring you may find a few years later that it was mistake to use these verses the traditional model
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Very true, though I suspect these days lots of companies get those letters and don’t disclose them to their customers.
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They can’t tell customers else they face the wrath of teh FBI or whatever Federal agency is using the National Security Letter which was made possible by the Patriot Act. I can’t remember who it was or the name of the service but there was one guy who ran an email service and he refused to comply with the FBI’s National Security Letter and choose to shut it all down versus comply.
At the time my thought was the way to counter this is to have a daily process that sends out a legal notice to customers saying that today we have not received a National Security letter for access to your data. Should teh FBI come one day with such a demand and letter you just stop sending that daily message which the conditions of teh letter force you to b/c you’re not supposed to say anything to teh client so the daily email saying “We’ve not gotten one today” would have to be shut down. See where this is going?
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