There years ago It was a price war between public clouds. In the year In 2014, to take one example, Amazon’s AWS lowered its price in response to a competing service that Google had recently launched.
Since those heady days, the cloud infrastructure market has matured and changed. Of course, AWS is still the top dog, with Microsoft and Google both working to share the lead (and each other). But the era of seemingly endless price cuts has been overtaken by a different market narrative: While it’s cheaper to start building on public cloud services, it can get cheaper over time.
The exchange made the choice to build its own infrastructure from a single data point. (TechCrunch’s coverage of the event in 2017 is worth your time.) We wanted to get a better sense of what founders and CEOs are thinking about their public cloud choices and their strengths and weaknesses.
So we got hold of BuildBuddy (early-stage, YC-backed, managed services offering), Monte Carlo (mid-stage, high-growth, data-focused) and a few companies we’ve been following while gathering input. Egnyte (a late-stage, profitable, near-IPO cloud storage and productivity-focused company) for a broader view.
We surveyed the three founders and include their full responses below. But first, a few observations on their answers.
Don’t build alone
The number of companies that have built on a public cloud and then gone solo is very small. Although Dropbox managed the transition and later made significant profits in the effort, most companies that build on the public cloud remain there.
And that seems to be the case. The two young companies we surveyed cited the scale required to make such a transition economical. The CEO of Egnyte, the leader of a company with a history of cloud storage – which means it certainly has the required scale, right? – He mentions some more modest issues where he can use his own hardware instead of public cloud services. But if Egnyte is still content to use public cloud infrastructure, well, we can imagine that almost all startups can stay put.
Mostly (cloud) single
Both BuildyBuddy (GCP) and Monte Carlo (AWS) are single-cloud companies. Egnyte has non-core workloads in the cloud, but points out that it is somewhat intensive. As before, we’re seeing similar answers from every company aside from their size. This is why AWS et al. Working with startup accelerator; If you get a company on your public cloud at a young age, you have a customer for life (almost).
