Not to mention that I can: - Create a bucket and store 1MB in it without any overhead - Create 50 buckets with strong perimeters around them such that someone deleting the entire account doesn’t bring down the other 49 - Create a bucket and fill it with terabytes of data within seconds and don’t need to wait for hardware to be racked and stacked - Create a bucket, fill it with 2TB of data, and delete it tomorrow

Cloud is more than bare metal, but plenty of folks discount the cost benefits of elasticity.

I suspect the problem is that we're engineers in domains that have very different needs.

For example, I agree that elasticity is great. But at the same time, to me, it sounds like bad engineering. Why do you need to store terabytes of data and then delete it - couldn't it be processed continuously, streamed, compressed, process changes only, and so on. A lot of engineering today is incredibly wasteful. Maybe your data source doesn't care, and just provides you with terabyte csv files, and you have no choice, but for engineers that care about efficiency, it reeks.

It might make a lot of sense in a highly corporate context where everything is hard, nobody cares, and the cost of inefficiency is just passed on to the customer (i.e. often government and tax payers). But the real problem here is that customers aren't demanding more efficiency.

Alone the fact of audit gives you a lot of reasons to keep data. Even if it gets downsampled one way or the other.

And plenty of use cases have natural growth. I do not throw away my pictures for example.

Data also grows dependent of users. More users, more 'live' data.

We have such a huge advantage with digital, we need to stop thinking its wasteful. Everything we do digital (pictures, finance data, etc.) is so much more energy and space efficient than what we had 20 years ago, we should just not delete data because we feel its wasteful.