Your Organization Cloud bill will be as complex as US Health Insurance pretty soon...

Take this prediction with pinch of salt, almost like the guy who predicted in late 1800's that London streets will have feet of dust on the road because of number of horses buggies going down the roads. Which was not true because car's invented and we started dusting our skies with pollution instead of roads. We screwed it up either way, thats a different story.

Lets analyze Health Care Insurance in US, it is one of the most complicated system which can throw off statisticians, attorneys and mathematicians equally. every body part is different, eyes are different than teeth different than nose/throat different than rest of the body, don't forget about pre-existing conditions, co-pays, out of pocket, max cap. Different diseases are treated differently. All the best if you can understand your "Explanation of Benefits" letter. Every year the costs are increasing and regulations are most complex. To add to that 50 states have 50 different rules.

I feel the Cloud is also going the same way. Somehow you have a control if you are using SaaS, you will be billed per subscription or usage of licenses. Little complex but still OK if you are using IaaS. Your bill will be different based on Core, memory and network topology. Once you step into PaaS , I feel like you can closely compare to American Health Insurance industry. Your application size matter, geography region matters, tiers matter. If it is database number of read/writes. Your network ingress and egress is different than the rest of the bill. Your Monitoring is different bill, Storage capacity is different bill. If you think this is complex enough wait until you step into consumption model, you can never estimate what's your bill is going to be.

It will be very difficult for organization to estimate their infra costs. In the days of on-prem data center they know whats their max bill and limit. Here you have to trust your divisions to take best judgement call on efficient utilization of cloud capacity. Like all other services I always see teams hogging on to more and more cloud capacity and they can never come down on the usage.

How painful it is currently for individuals on Health Insurance , it will be same way for organizations in the near future for Cloud. Figure it out before rest of your competition. Your discipline in cloud spend today can lead to reduced operating cost of IT in the future.