Cult of the Cloud

Revealing the staggering level of (often times wilful) ignorance regarding hyperscale public cloud IaaS adoption

Revealing the staggering level of (often times wilful) ignorance regarding hyperscale public cloud IaaS adoption

(the above line is for LinkedIn previews, as it doesn’t seem to handle the metadata right for some reason)

Before I begin..

I want to say up front I don’t have any problem with “Cloud” as a concept, or even “Cloud” offerings from service providers, or even hyperscale providers. That is not what this site is about.

This site is about the staggering level of (oftentimes wilful) ignorance of the vast majority of the people leveraging these services that has grown over the past fifteen years. Also the massive level of misinformation that is communicated from many sources that often look like they otherwise should know what they are talking about.

This is also specifically about IaaS as offered by the hyperscale providers, nothing to do with PaaS, or SaaS.

This site is also specifically targeting those that have a IaaS bill of at least $50,000 per month(many may be surprised to know the insane number of organizations who are spending that or more and have absolutely no idea what is going on, small companies can be spending ten times that even!). If your bill is a few grand a month or less, you may still find this informative, but it’s really not targeted towards your use case.

Maybe best case scenario here I manage to educate some people with insight into how they can save their organizations potentially millions of dollars per year(if not much more), which is not a bad thing to think about in a deteriorating global economy.

Lastly, before we really get going I wanted to say not a single word of this website was created, nor inspired by “AI”. This is entirely me. I have never yet had a need to use any LLM, chat bot or anything to-date, as such I have not yet used such tools for any purpose. I accept that such tools can provide great value to many people in some situations, I just haven’t come across such a situation yet. I did spend roughly 40 hours writing/reviewing/updating this website before launch(ironically seemed to come to about 1 hour per 1,000 words unsure how that measures up to any standards). I don’t intend it to be much of an ongoing blog of some kind, more of a single large brain dump from my perspective of working in IT over the last twenty five years. Worst case, I can use this website to point people to for more information rather than duplicate my efforts every time I go to write a comment in response to cloud stuff.

Introduction

This is a term I came up with in late 2025, probably around the time I was engaged with folks writing messages regarding a large AWS outage at the time, and just seeing the massive amount of misinformation being distributed as if it was fact. Not really new but the sheer volume of it was rather alarming.

Those of you that have been around in the industry a while may recall the hacker group “The Cult of the Dead Cow“. I have no opinion on the group or their actions(I know almost nothing of them other than the fact that they exist). But in case it wasn’t obvious, my “Cult of the Cloud” is named like their group, the phrase just made sense, so I leveraged that brand(?) idea to create this new term.

While I target hyperscale providers specifically(pretty much universally applies to them all), technically, there is not a hard restriction on what this term applies to. Subjective, I know! It can be complicated(more below).

My first exposure to this cult was actually way back in early 2010, which I documented as part of “My cloud journey“, ironically it wasn’t even hyperscale at that point.

When I say Cloud, I mean IaaS

There are three major types of “cloud” things, for the purposes of this blog I am referring solely to being a customer of IaaS. You can see a bit more on what I am talking about in this dedicated post.

While I may “pick on” AWS , I am using them only as an example(in part that is where my IaaS experience comes from), not singling them out as the only player. All other hyperscale cloud companies have adopted similar/same models as AWS, so all of the things I talk about apply to all of them.

So for the purposes of simplicity, on this website, when I refer to the term Cloud, I usually mean “IaaS Cloud” (most commonly as implemented by the Hyperscale providers). I say usual because I’m not a professional writer(and I am the only one doing this), and I may not be able to catch and clarify every single time I use that term. In part because it is kind of strange to have a term “Cult of the IaaS Cloud” by contrast, or “Cult of IaaS” (because I am not going after IaaS as a concept, IaaS is fine as a concept, by itself). I have confidence that most technical people at least will not have a problem following along. If you are not technical, well I still hope you can follow along, but if there is something that requires additional clarification let me know.

I believe hyperscale public cloud usage dwarfs all other forms of public cloud by a large margin, so I believe when most people think of public cloud IaaS they probably think of these providers.

The usage of the term “Cult”

For most of my life, the idea of a cult was always a distant concept. Something I saw on TV show or movie, or even in a news story such as the Waco Texas siege in 1993.

I see people falling into one of the following buckets (almost like two sides to the same coin) as being either in this “Cult of the Cloud”, or heavily influenced by the cult.

  • When a person is presented with overwhelming evidence(yes I know that is subjective) as to why they should not use IaaS hyperscale cloud and their responses have no substance to them, one response could be nothing more than “I don’t believe you”. They have no actual evidence to refute anything, nor do they express any interest in obtaining such evidence to try to justify their position. They don’t care, you are just wrong(that doesn’t stop the person from initially disputing your claims, because if they did not dispute in some form you have no idea what their position is). The other person isn’t even required to respond. They can for example hear your arguments, and say “ok”. Then immediately discard them in their mind(without any justification or response back to the other person).
  • To signify people who when asked a question regarding hosting, infrastructure, building applications and stuff, their only response is cloud related. So much so that perhaps they can’t even imagine how/why someone would do anything but cloud. Many more recent entrants into the workforce were raised on nothing but cloud. That’s all they know(I absolutely saw this part coming fifteen years ago). But many folks that have been around for a lot longer are also in the cult to some degree (this continues to surprise me even in 2025).

I have worked directly with such people, who seemed perfectly happy with the way things were then wanted to add in stuff like IaaC, and Kubernetes, and other technologies most often associated with public cloud deployments. Really for no apparent reason other than “it sounded cool”, and it was “on trend”. Eventually they went hard core wanting to do cloud stuff. Some eventually ended up at a company where they did attempt a data center migration but from what I was told that migration was sort of a failure as they spent several years on it and still never managed to fully move to cloud, before the org ran out of money and was acquired, most employees were axed.

(Side note: really seems there is a strong “Cult of AI” out there in 2025, from what I have read anyway in articles and comments(especially on LinkedIn), feel bad for those that are being forced to the stuff if they aren’t interested in using it, since the benefits seem mixed at best in most situations. Maybe things will cool down once the bubble bursts. I haven’t had any exposure to this situation myself with “AI”. Maybe someday someone will register the “cultof.ai” domain and write about it.)

You might be in the Cult of the Cloud if …

  • You say something like
    • “Running a global platform requires infrastructure only three companies can provide. That’s not competition. That’s dependency. And dependency just became dangerous.”  (LinkedIn post)
    • React as if the only solution to preventing impact from another AWS outage in a given region is either to go multi region, and/or multi cloud (MANY LinkedIn posts/comments)
    • Public cloud really shines when you are at a large scale (LinkedIn comment)
    • The only way I can scale my application to suite my users is “auto scaling” in public cloud (LinkedIn comment)
    • “Our company needs to be in the cloud because we want to focus on the business not on managing infrastructure” (couldn’t find the exact quote on LinkedIn.)
    • “We have no choice but to use AWS, and that’s a problem” (President of Signal chat platform, link is to news article)
  • Really think these things are cool (the more matches, the more likely you may be in the cult) – I don’t believe any of these things bad(on their own), they all have their use cases, I just see them as indicators at the same time.
  • You do something like
  • You are
    • Broadcom (who seems to be axing all of their non cloud VMware product SKUs, because profit!)

Don’t care about the money…until they are forced to

A sure sign of being in the “Cult of the Cloud” are organizations that invest heavily to move to public cloud, perhaps stay there for a while, then move out again. You can ask yourself, why did they move to begin with, and why did it sometimes take several years for them to realize reality and change course?

IMO, there is only one answer. There were people, almost certainly in high positions at the organization that were (perhaps unknowingly) members of the “Cult of the Cloud”, convinced without a doubt that Cloud is the future and they have to do it. So they spend a lot of money making it happen. They see it’s super expensive, but they keep at it, convinced they can make it work, maybe hiring people that specialize in optimizing your cloud spend. They keep at it .. until someone else likely forces their hand on the costs(or perhaps some other reason but I’d be 95% of the time it is cost), and they decide to move out.

Some Public Cloud Myths

(Note: this content is duplicated on this new dedicated page as of 12/6/2025, as of 4/3/2026 I have removed these items from this page, but keeping the heading around for now, check the dedicated page for the myths, they are otherwise unchanged)

For a good laugh

I had completely forgotten about this, but if you haven’t seen this video from 2014, it is great, the whole video is great but he directly talks about cloud stuff starting at 5min36s into the video. Quite hilarious and so true..

James Mickens from Microsoft Research at Monitorama 2014

Lastly

If you are in the group of super happy cloud customers paying $50,000+/mo and think that is a fair price I’d really be interested to know what you actually have provisioned and how much you are actually paying for it. Honestly not expecting anyone to come forward, but I’d be mainly interested to be proven “wrong” in some scenario. Such a scenario would not include being happy with cloud and over paying by millions per year and not caring about it, I’m perfectly happy to accept there are many such situations out there(goes back to the tagline of the site), having been close to such situations myself during “My Cloud Journey“.

(Side note: I’d really like to see what Atlassian pays for their cloud stuff, I’m guessing it would be entertaining to see the real numbers..)