The cloud was the perfect match. Until it wasn’t.

By Sanni Salokangas

Feb 13, 2026

They grew up together.

It’s a simple story. Not quite boy meets girl. Innovative startup meets feature–packed US hyperscaler cloud.

In the early days, it looked like a perfect match. They worked so effortlessly together. Always complementary.

It was affordable. Always available. It removed friction the startup had always assumed was inevitable and normal.

They experimented together. Failed quickly together. They tried again and again, iterating their way to product-market fit. It was symbiotic. No constant approval cycles. No waiting weeks for infrastructure.

They couldn’t imagine existing without the other.

Was this the L-word?

Building a business with some one you love? Great idea.

Provisioning became faster. Infrastructure became easier to scale. Capacity no longer required long-term planning. Servers no longer took weeks to procure. Deep operational expertise was no longer required just to get started.

The cloud changed how businesses were built.

For startups, this was transformative. For enterprises, it unlocked speed. For almost everyone, it lowered the cost of trying new things. Free tiers. Simple pricing pages. Documentation that made everything look easy.

The love deepened.

The L-word turned out to be LOCK-IN.

The relationship between businesses and the cloud evolved quickly. They became inseparable. But what used to be a good, mutually beneficial relationship turned toxic as both sides grew older over the years.

Toxic relationships, however, tend to be the most addictive.

As the cloud matured, it grew larger, more sophisticated, more profitable. Pricing models became detailed enough to require their own specialists.

Discounts arrived, tied to multi-year commitments. Data transfer fees made certain exits expensive. Deeply integrated services worked beautifully together, but less so outside the ecosystem.

Leaving was technically possible, but economically inconvenient.

They never directly said they were irreplaceable. And none of this happened maliciously. It happened gradually, through entirely reasonable product decisions that made staying easier than leaving.

A happy ending?

But this is _not_ a breakup story. It’s a tale of coming of age.

When you realise the world is a big place, people change and businesses shouldn’t settle for compromise.

Modern IT without the cloud can be slow and unnecessarily painful for many organisations. The cloud remains powerful, efficient, and, for many workloads, an excellent tool for the job.

But the world has changed. The most resilient organisations now design for optionality. They place different workloads in different environments. Some remain because it is still the right tool for certain workloads. Others go elsewhere because control, predictability, or regulatory clarity matters more than anything else.