I’ll write more about Eli Lilly’s (rumored) decision to abandon Amazon Web Services in my Weekly Update, but I want to briefly explain why these types of contractual issues won’t likely be overcome any time soon. Cloud provider contracts uniformly absolve the provider of all liability and limit damages to those spelled out in the SLA. This is troublesome to large customers, for whom outages could mean millions in terms of lost sales or lost opportunities. But, by definition, services like AWS are anonymous, and Amazon can’t assume liability for workloads it doesn’t even know are running, nor is it necessarily a wise idea to pick and choose individual customers for special terms. If public cloud computing is ever to catch on among large enterprises, contractual terms will have to evolve.