Let’s call out what’s painfully obvious: Cloud environments are inherently chaotic. Enterprises run thousands of workloads across hundreds of services, often spanning multiple regions or cloud bands. This complexity makes it nearly impossible to reduce an entire cloud ecosystem to a single unit cost. An overly simplistic model often results in more confusion than clarity.
For instance, say your cloud unit represents cost per transaction. If this cost increases, what does that mean? Are inefficiencies driving the uptick or is it a sign of additional investments in scaling infrastructure during a seasonal surge in demand? Cloud units don’t offer that kind of granularity. Instead, they paint with broad strokes, making it easy to misinterpret valuable strategic spending as waste.
Every enterprise operates differently
Some companies focus on customer experience. Others pour resources into creating innovative products. Many have business models that don’t fit a standard mold. Yet cloud units are, by definition, one size fits all. They assume that all workloads should be mapped to the same primary output: the lowest cost per transaction, cost per gigabyte, or cost per instance hour.