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a16z Infra #6: The Cost of Cloud vs. Repatriation

Episode Summary

For many SaaS companies, the cost of cloud can be 50% or more of COGS. When does the cost of cloud become too much? a16z Infra host Martin Casado brings together guests with different strategies and experiences for managing the cost of cloud, from full repatriation to doubling down on AWS.

Episode Notes

This conversation centers on the arguments and findings of the a16z piece The Cost of Cloud, a Trillion Dollar Paradox. 

• The Core Findings of The Cost of Cloud piece [5:22]
• Cloud is a significant part of COGS for public SaaS companies [8:38]
• Should you allocate engineers to reduce cloud cost or just focus on growth? [12:06]
• How much of a problem is not knowing cloud spend? [15:56]
• The tradeoff between focusing cost and engineering resources [19:33]
• Should large public SaaS companies repatriate? [23:41]
• Performance  matters -- it's not all about cost [31:55]
• Is all the talent for running data centers at the Google, AWS, and Azure? [37:46]
• Will the cloud feature set become commoditized? [44:57]
• Cloud oligopoly and market dynamics [50:39]

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