Week 2 Posting - Cloud Servers versus Services

I have been at several companies that made the move to the cloud when it was beginning to peak in popularity. Migration tools and free consultants made it easy to move our servers to the equivalent Azure virtual machines. When moving services to the cloud there is always a time at the beginning when the costs are cheap and the full scale of the bill hasn't fully hit. It takes a little while for the costs to settle.

Unfortunately, this type of migration isn't sustainable. These same companies I have seen move to the cloud very quickly decide they need to move back to on-premise data centers. As I have watched this happen it has formed my opinion to be that using virtual machines in the cloud is not cost-effective. While short-term utilization of virtual machines is nice to do development and testing, cloud services should be prioritized over cloud servers.

By adopting cloud services, admins get the most cost-effective solutions that can scale. This means that instead of migrating your entire server cluster that runs an API gateway and costs $6,000 per month in the cloud, use the native cloud serverless API gateway that is priced per API call and only costs $100 per month.

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