One of many issues we mentioned advert nauseam on the pods final 12 months was how ready the buyer and companies have been to enter a recession. The patron was flush with money from fiscal stimulus, and companies have been additionally sitting on a ton of money after binging on debt in 2021.

I used to be desirous about this concept whereas studying Amazon’s 2022 shareholder letter, emphasis mine:

AWS has an $85B annualized income run price, remains to be early in its adoption curve, however at a juncture the place it’s essential to remain targeted on what issues most to clients over the long-haul. Regardless of rising 29% year-over 12 months in 2022 on a $62B income base, AWS faces short-term headwinds proper now as corporations are being extra cautious in spending given the difficult, present macroeconomic circumstances. Whereas some corporations would possibly obsess over how they might extract as a lot cash from clients as attainable in these tight occasions, it’s neither what clients need nor greatest for purchasers in the long run, so we’re taking a distinct tack. One of many many benefits of AWS and cloud computing is that when your online business grows, you’ll be able to seamlessly scale up; and conversely, if your online business contracts, you’ll be able to select to provide us again that capability and stop paying for it. This elasticity is exclusive to the cloud, and doesn’t exist if you’ve already made costly capital investments in your individual on-premises datacenters, servers, and networking gear.

I’m not saying cloud computing can forestall a recession, however it will possibly positively make a downturn simpler to handle. The flexibility for corporations to show the knobs down nearly in a single day has big implications for a way companies do enterprise.