Wednesday, August 19th, 2026 Independent & Reader-Supported
Enterprises spent a year making sure they could switch between model providers. The switch turns out to run through a small number of clouds, chips and inference platforms that no procurement policy addressed.
Logging, metrics and tracing bills have grown faster than the infrastructure they monitor. Engineering teams are discovering that the instrumentation is now a line item that needs its own budget review.
Repatriation was dismissed for years as a vendor talking point. It is now a line item, driven less by ideology than by workloads whose usage stopped being unpredictable.