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A Cloudy Betrayal: After unanimously winning over the computing and storage needs of enterprise and professional customers, cloud providers are now grappling with a complex, evolving market. Many customers now affirm that cloud computing is no longer as cheap or convenient as it once was.
A company specializing in cloud computing services recently published its latest report on the state of the cloud market. According to Civo's analysis, this year's cloud computing landscape is causing significant headaches for many enterprise customers and corporate administrators. The market now faces "significant challenges," and prices are becoming more of a burden than a cost-saving opportunity.
Civo surveyed over 500 professionals in the cloud industry, gathering data to analyze current trends, challenges, and strategies shaping the future of cloud computing. The report focuses specifically on Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Amazon Web Services – the three largest cloud vendors that exert an undeniable dominance over smaller competitors.
Civo found that 77.4 percent of the industry professionals surveyed are using one of these three major hyperscale players. The research confirms that Amazon, Microsoft, and Google play a critical role in the industry, which exacerbates issues related to market saturation, "cost complexity," and vendor lock-in.
Over the past 12 months, 59 percent of the surveyed organizations saw an increase in their cloud spending. Civo compared the big three vendors using a simple, carefully chosen cloud configuration: a three-node cluster that included 200 GB of persistent storage and a 5 TB data transfer threshold.
According to data provided by the UK company, the cost of the aforementioned setup in an Azure environment increased from $1,278.58 in 2022 to $1,458.68 in 2024. On Google's cloud platform, the cost rose from $1,107.61 to $1,250.35. Meanwhile, Amazon raised prices from $1,142.46 to $1,234.59.
Civo told The Register that "the Kubernetes prices were taken from the hyperscalers' very own pricing calculators." The company suggests that cloud platform prices are rising faster than the rate of inflation, with customers paying more for the same value. The report also cites an IDC study stating that, despite the many benefits of the cloud, an overwhelming majority (71 percent) of surveyed companies expect to partially or fully migrate their public cloud workloads back to a dedicated IT environment within the next two years.
The Register reached out to the cloud hyperscalers for their response to Civo's report. An AWS representative highlighted that the company has reduced prices 134 times since the service's introduction in 2006, while simultaneously improving reliability, availability, and security.
Microsoft and Google chose not to comment publicly on the report. However, one representative unofficially suggested that Civo's analysis focused on "cherry-picked" figures related to a very specific cluster configuration. In response, Civo stated that the configuration it selected is commonly used by its customer base.
"While we understand that no single setup can represent every use case perfectly, we believe this configuration offers a helpful reference point for many potential customers," the company said.