Interestingly enough, Intel and AMD market values are affected by this but the cloud provider aren't, which I find surprising.
If your cloud provider lowers its performance/efficiency by 30%, isn't it up to its customers to switch? But where to switch too? There's no choice among the big cloud providers. They all use Intel and AMD in varying amounts. As a cloud user you are stuck with Intel or AMD chips. Demand doesn't change, supply is lowered.
Looking at it like this, it is more likely that demand for cloud resources will rise, and as such revenue of the cloud providers will as well.
[0]: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux-41...
This is an issue, but laypeople are overblowing the effect on their everyday computing.
[0]https://gist.github.com/woachk/2f86755260f2fee1baf71c90cd653...
It's mostly inelastic. People don't buy resources unless they need to do work. Alternatives, such as on-prem hardware, are affected as well.
The only work that would be affected would be the work that becomes unprofitable at a 10-30% hardware cost increase and this is probably marginal enough to be ignored.
I work on a system (at Google) with significant hardware cost. Fundamentally, the work my system is doing needs to be done. But the time we spend improving efficiency is hugely elastic. I look at a CPU profile or request flow, have an idea to improve it, look at how much machine resources we're spending, guesstimate how long it will take us to implement and maintain, and use a chart to see if my idea is worth my team's time or not.[1]
If the resources get more expensive or simply impossible to acquire,[2] we'll optimize more.
[1] There are other considerations (will it make the code more complex, thus increasing risk of a security/privacy flaw? what about opportunity cost given that it's hard to hire more engineers and scale a team?) but that's a reasonable mental model.
[2] There's a global RAM and SSD manufacturing crunch already, and if lots of CPUs are replaced due to these vulnerabilities or simply are no longer enough, that's gonna be a big crunch as well. If you're one of the few biggest cloud providers, I think you can't just replace / add tons more hardware than planned without dramatically increasing the price per unit for everyone.
In the context of the above posts, "elastic" is an economic term used to refer to the demand curve. There is no supply/demand curve when it comes to internal technical decisions for optimization =)
I would say your work is highly correlated to the price of hardware per some unit of performance AND the amount of work that you need to complete AND the amount of hardware already available AND the cost of labor needed for optimization.
I imagine in your case, since these systems are tightly controlled, you can probably run unpatched without taking a substantial risk.
Cloud is probably a fraction of Google’s, IBM’s, Oracle’s and MS’s profits. It’s probably a significant part of Amazon’s profits but Amazon doesn’t trade on earnings.