Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg has come out to say what is on most businesses’ minds – that cloud computing is too expensive.
He isn’t the only one, as the medical research community is also challenged to make significant scientific progress due to rising costs of cloud services.
According to the report by Techradar, Mark had questioned the cost of cloud computing during a recent discussion about bio-sequencing. He also specifically called out Amazon Web Service (AWS).
The Chan Zuckerberg Biohub is an initiative that Mark had started in 2015 with his wife, to leverage technology for health, social and scientific research.
The research centre’s co-presidents Dr. Joseph DeRisi and Dr. Stephen Quake pointed out that the high costs of cloud services are often a barrier that many are unable to overcome.
Mark zoomed in on cloud’s compute capabilities as being the “bottleneck” for progress.
“It’s interesting, the bottleneck for progress, in medical research at this point, a lot of the cost for it, is on compute and the data side and not strictly on the wet labs or how long it takes to turn around experiments,” he was reported as saying.
While this observation of rising costs comes from medical research, EITN is thinking other industries are feeling the pinch of using cloud computing technologies, as well.
Techradar has an interesting list of cloud spending trends, pointing out that Apple spends millions each month on AWS.
Enterprises are also looking to optimise cloud spend as costs grow, while AWS revenues have grown to contribute to more than half of Amazon’s overall revenue.
Are rising costs due to organisations using more and more cloud resources, or are they due to AWS raising the price of compute?
Might it be time for cloud providers to consider a more sustainable pricing model so that areas like medical research won’t be impeded any more and instead focus on the all-important task of discovering medical breakthroughs?
