One of the original promises of the cloud was reduced operational overhead—you wouldn’t need armies of sysadmins or people racking hardware. But at scale, the opposite seems to happen. We have hundreds of cloud engineers. That headcount is growing faster than any other part of R&D. The tooling, services, and interdependencies are increasingly complex, and managing reliability feels harder, not easier.

Then there’s cost. Cloud spend is rising far faster than the growth of the business, and the pricing—especially for storage—is getting harder to justify. We’ve hit the point where some parts of our cloud bill look downright absurd.

We’re not inexperienced at this—we’ve been in the cloud longer than many companies have existed.

Cloud is starting to feel like a trap, am I just an out of touch old man?