Ask HN: Will the energy price fluctuation affect cloud pricing?
I've had a random thought...
With the energy price fluctuations in Europe (particularly the UK), when could we expect those increases to trickle down to the likes of cloud providers?
I've read stories of companies running up large bills for the various AWS services because they had forgotten about them or misconfigured them etc, but will there be more stories to come of companies getting large bills because of the energy crisis?
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I've seen some colos where power was metered in some fashion (often just a limit, rather than billing), but it seems unlikely to show up directly in cloud providers. If energy prices get really crazy, they can always throttle the cpus to reduce total consumption and may or may not be transparent about it. Replacing older equipment usually gives a good power efficiency boost as well, to the point that a lot of older facilities have power and not space as the limit. Adjusting HVAC strategies can make a big difference in power consumption as well; higher set points and/or outside air sourced cooling when available can save a lot of power, and may not make a large difference in equipment reliability.
I would be interested in seeing the difference in impact between large and small scale cloud providers. Larger providers have been able to vertically integrate and build/operate/fund power generation for their datacenters.
Almost all of this around renewables, which means they have to get energy elsewhere during the power gen gaps. Although, depending on policy of the local area they could still be mostly insulated from price increases as the energy they sell back to the grid will also fetch a higher price.
Unrelated to this question but related to that sentence, I've been talking with some people to come up with an interesting pricing plan for our product (ML platform), and that's been one of their concerns, so we're thinking of introducing limits and alerts.
The marginal cost may go up which at a large enough scale may actually do some damage to some organizations, but it's all consumption based so (to your point) just remember to shut down idle resources.