Even products with the most predictable behavior can be ‘unstable’ in terms of cloud resource requirements. Market needs changes, companies pivot their strategy direction, and as recent history has shown, global or national events do happen and greatly impact businesses, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse, but always with major change in compute requirements (take for example Zoom’s 2900% increase in users going from 10 million daily meeting participants in December 2019 to over 300 million by April 2020).

So the question is how you – whichever group you identify with – can still take advantage of reserved capacity benefits even without being 100% sure of your future needs? How can you safely balance making a long-term commitment to lower your costs, without being exposed to the risk of negative ROI and wasted cloud resources?