On the face it, this seems counter-intuitive. Improved efficiency leads to greater productivity which should lead to a resource savings. In fact, however, it meant just the opposite: As coal power got cheaper, people found more and more things to do with it. In the end, people consumed so much more coal at the lower price that the total amount spent on coal rose rather than fell. This phenomenon came to be labelled the "Jevons Paradox."
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Computing is, of course, a premier example of this paradox. Despite the enormously lower cost of computers that's occurred over the years due to Moore's Law, total spending on computing has steadily risen. The past few years have been an exception to this regular progression most of the server companies have seen essentially flat revenues, meaning that shipments failed to increase enough to offset the lower cost of processing. Boiled down, this means that enterprises haven't been installing enough servers to grow the market.
Has hyperscale led to hypersales
This past quarter, however, broke the recent pattern server revenues were up over 18 percent, year-over-year. According to Gartner, total server numbers grew 13 percent, with particularly strong growth in the so-called hyperscale segment those servers used by large Web properties and cloud computing providers.
This growth spurt indicates that public cloud providers are experiencing a "Jevons Moment." Users are flocking to cloud computing due to its lower cost, compared to previous computing options (on-premises or colo hosting). And you can expect that this is just the beginnings of gigantic growth spurt in server shipments, and consequently, in cloud computing revenues.
The mix of server types in the numbers indicates the transition we're seeing as enterprises begin shifting increasing portions of their application portfolios to the cloud. We're still in the early days of this sea change, with this quarter's report providing just a hint of what's to come. Jevon identified his paradox early in the massive adoption of energy consumption, the end results of which can be seen today. Energy is treated as a low-cost service applied throughout every aspect of society something absolutely unimaginable 160 years ago.
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I believe, however, that the growth of cloud computing is likely to outstrip even the growth implied by Jevons Paradox. The paradox focuses on what happens when a good or service becomes less expensive to use, i.e., when you use less coal for a given amount of work, you'll do more work and use more coal. It really says nothing about the good or service being easier to consume. And it's cloud computing's consumption ease commonly referred to as agility that will drive cloud growth (and thereby server shipments) way beyond what might be expected due to the Jevons Paradox.
Frictionless provisioning faster, cheaper
This consumption ease is vastly underestimated even by those who espouse agility as the primary driver of cloud adoption. Compared to the lengthy, weeks- or months-long painful process that typifies infrastructure provisioning in legacy environments, cloud provisioning is virtually friction-free: from initial request to instance availability is mere minutes.
Use cases that were never even considered in the past due to the hard work associated with the provisioning process become commonplace in a cloud world. I've worked with many companies that never did real quality or load testing, because resources simply weren't available, but are now doing both in the cloud, simply because it's possible. Likewise, companies are now doing much more experimentation and prototyping because they can quickly access resources (and just as quickly discard if the trial doesn't work out).
Last quarter's jump will come to be seen, in retrospect, as the inflection point where computing's nature changed. Simply put, we are on the cusp of an enormous transformation as computing resource provisioning transitions from expensive and complex to cheap and low-friction.
What are some likely outcomes we'll see from cloud computing's "Jevons moment" Here are a few:
One of the amazing things is how much our society has changed since Jevons first did the analysis that led to his paradox. In the mere span of 150 years, life changed for humans more than it did since they first emerged hundreds of thousands of years ago. The change that this next Jevons Paradox will bring will vastly exceed that of the original one. It's going to be a wild ride.