Zuckerberg slams AWS' cloud computing costs

Prices of cloud computing now higher than running experiments, says Facebook boss

Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg has questioned the high costs of AWS' cloud computing, particularly when it comes to medical research.

The social media tycoon and his wife set up their philanthropic foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg (CZ) Biohub, in 2015 to advance research into health, social and scientific issues through technology.

During a Facebook livestream with Drs. Joseph DeRisi and Stephen Quake, the Biohub's co-presidents, Zuckerberg declared that the high cost of cloud computing is a recurrence on the agenda of its meetings.

"In our Bio board meetings, one of the things we talk about is the cost of the compute, and our AWS bill, for example, is one of the specific points," he said.

"Let's call up Jeff [Bezos] and talk about this. It's interesting; the bottleneck for progress - in medical research at this point - a lot of the cost for it is on compute and the data side and not strictly on the wet labs or how long it takes to turn around experiments."

Bill Mew, a strategic advisor at Advice Cloud, tweeted that Zuckerberg could use Facebook's cloud capabilities to undercut AWS, if the costs were too high.

The CZ Biohub is funded by donations and counts Linked In co-founder Reid Hoffman as a donor. It currently has a wide range of projects in progress, including research into cell biology, brain implants and early detection of cancer.

Quake added that other medical research organisations -particularly in developing countries - may not have the same level of funding available to them as the Biohub and that the costs associated with cloud computing can become a barrier to their progress.

"The cost of the sequencing and the lab work has gotten to the point where you can do this almost anywhere in the world - it's gotten that cheap," Quake stated.

"The compute to be able to analyse that data is unfortunately not available to the vast majority of the people that do that.

"It's very often the case that you'll go to one of these low-income resource settings, they'll have a sequencer but its collecting dust because they can't compute. Even if they can access the cloud, they can't afford it."

AWS pitches itself as a way for businesses to replace upfront capital infrastructure expenses with low variable costs that scale with their growth.

Zuckerberg, however, isn't the only tech boss to question the cost of cloud computing, with Michael Dell claiming in 2017 that running IT in the cloud costs some customers twice as much.