[Discuss] What Happens when a cloud service shuts down

[Richard Pieri]

> Maybe I'm late to the IT party, but how do you mean that it's going
> back to the way it used to be?  I've never really experienced (that I

In the old-old days, only the largest institutions could afford computers.  Smaller organizations leased time on their iron.  That's just how things were done.

And that's what you do today when you buy time on Amazon's or Google's data centers: you lease time on their iron.  The nature of the iron has changed.  It's now a huge cluster of relatively small units instead of a room-sized monolith but the use model is the same and just as importantly the reason is the same.

--Rich P.