Did you know Amazon EC2 turns 20 next Tuesday August 25th? Here’s a story that covers it. But there is a catch though. We’re repeating the same mistakes with AI we did with cloud. As in we went from “wow, that’s incredible” to “hang on, why’s the bill $500k?”
Martin Reynolds, Field CTO at Harness had this to say:
“EC2 taught us what happens when infrastructure scales faster than governance. Twenty years later, we’re making the same mistakes with AI – only at a much faster pace.
“By making infrastructure faster and easier to provision, EC2 paved the way for modern software delivery. But that flexibility came with a new failure mode. Costs, sprawl and vendor lock-in crept in as cloud usage scaled, often before organisations had the governance in place to control it. We spent the better part of a decade building those controls after the fact.
“AI agents are EC2 in fast-forward. They can provision resources, call APIs, choose tools and rack up spend with even less friction. But businesses have even less visibility into what agents are doing, which tools they’re using and where that spend is going. We’re heading towards the same governance problem, only this time the technology is moving much faster.
“Organisations need to learn from what went wrong with cloud rather than repeat the cycle with AI. Governance can’t be something that gets bolted on once agents have reached scale. It needs to be built into how agents operate from the start, instead of a dashboard you check after the invoice arrives.
“We spent a decade teaching cloud to behave. We don’t have a decade to teach AI the same lesson.”
If you rely on AI anything, I would watch those bills carefully as they can expand massively without warning. Which of course would be bad for all of us.
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This entry was posted on August 19, 2026 at 8:30 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Amazon. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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Amazon EC2 Turns 20 Years Old
Did you know Amazon EC2 turns 20 next Tuesday August 25th? Here’s a story that covers it. But there is a catch though. We’re repeating the same mistakes with AI we did with cloud. As in we went from “wow, that’s incredible” to “hang on, why’s the bill $500k?”
Martin Reynolds, Field CTO at Harness had this to say:
“EC2 taught us what happens when infrastructure scales faster than governance. Twenty years later, we’re making the same mistakes with AI – only at a much faster pace.
“By making infrastructure faster and easier to provision, EC2 paved the way for modern software delivery. But that flexibility came with a new failure mode. Costs, sprawl and vendor lock-in crept in as cloud usage scaled, often before organisations had the governance in place to control it. We spent the better part of a decade building those controls after the fact.
“AI agents are EC2 in fast-forward. They can provision resources, call APIs, choose tools and rack up spend with even less friction. But businesses have even less visibility into what agents are doing, which tools they’re using and where that spend is going. We’re heading towards the same governance problem, only this time the technology is moving much faster.
“Organisations need to learn from what went wrong with cloud rather than repeat the cycle with AI. Governance can’t be something that gets bolted on once agents have reached scale. It needs to be built into how agents operate from the start, instead of a dashboard you check after the invoice arrives.
“We spent a decade teaching cloud to behave. We don’t have a decade to teach AI the same lesson.”
If you rely on AI anything, I would watch those bills carefully as they can expand massively without warning. Which of course would be bad for all of us.
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This entry was posted on August 19, 2026 at 8:30 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Amazon. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.