the -> cloud -> datacenter -> cloud -> datacenter move will by cyclical every few years.
companies that were in the cloud in 2018, did not have to pay the high costs of fixing hardware that was vulnerable to spectre/meltdown. in some cases, migrating from a datacenter to the cloud was cheaper than upgrading datacenters full of vulnerable hardware.
now with everyone in the cloud, datacenters have lower prices - so its going to draw companies into datacenters. in a few years, though, theyll have to either upgrade their hardware, or move back to the cloud. its gonna cycle like this for the forseeable future.
“But you have to pay for expensive technical experts to run your own computers, you don’t with AWS/Azure.”
That’s the usual comeback from the cloud true believers.
The essential message that AWS wants you to believe “Your company doesn’t have the skills to run computers, and you need no technical experts at all to use AWS”.
The cloud is where Moores Law goes to die - insanely expensive slow computers.
I was at Next '25 last week and sat through several meals with other executives who are on GCP. I was speechless at the comments made by one executive from a regional bank located in the South. He was quite cavalier in his commentary that firing all of their seasoned 'IT' pros and dissolution of their data centers was the best thing ever; going so far as to proudly claim they were all fired because those folks were purposefully torpedoing cloud migration to save their jobs.
Sitting next to him was a C-level executive from a public sector organization in one of the Mountain states lamenting the costs associated with their cloud deployments and lack of seasoned IT pros, due to the lack of ability to hire and retain IT professionals at the low wages allowed by budgetary constraint. While they could more easily gain limited investment from the state legislature for initiatives and the consulting companies advising them on strategy, they are now hamstrung by rising costs associated with what I call 'The Timeshare Points Model' where (overly-simplistically) $1 == 1 credit today but $2 == 1 credit tomorrow, even though--traditionally--compute and RAM costs go DOWN over time, not up, for the same level of service.
It was absolutely wild to me that there are still folks who truly believe that they can somehow save money without knowledgeable and thoughtful staff on hand to make smart decisions to run workloads in a cost-conscious manner and instead trust these cloud computing platforms to just do everything for them with unpredictable and ever-increasing cost.
From business perspective it's often hard to see these long-term lock-ins and potential effects of those. And hyperscalers focus in on creating narration where moving to the cloud "accelerates" your business. Sure, you don't need to deal with data center things, but eventually you still have people operating the cloud and it's just different kind of talent - but they are still FTEs you need to manage. So the business question remains on the ROI of the investment and currently data center investments bring very high ROI for those who dare.
heh. you also have to deal with mail theft when you have your own hardware. having a project delayed for 6 months because theives stole a shipment of solid state drives is something i don't want to go through again, lol
I told our VP of engineering the other day that the problem they're having is putting everything into locked-in/managed services when you should be owning your product.
The service I built has 99.99% availability, most of that was achieved by putting it in K8S clusters in multiple regions behind a CDN. Only managed service I rely on is SQL with better guaranteed uptime than I have (also way cheaper than doing it ourselves).
Aside from SQL, I can lift-and-shift almost all of our services at a moments notice. The only problem would be slightly degraded database query time, but we do a lot of caching in the clusters.
the -> cloud -> datacenter -> cloud -> datacenter move will by cyclical every few years.
companies that were in the cloud in 2018, did not have to pay the high costs of fixing hardware that was vulnerable to spectre/meltdown. in some cases, migrating from a datacenter to the cloud was cheaper than upgrading datacenters full of vulnerable hardware.
now with everyone in the cloud, datacenters have lower prices - so its going to draw companies into datacenters. in a few years, though, theyll have to either upgrade their hardware, or move back to the cloud. its gonna cycle like this for the forseeable future.
If you are old enough in IT you will remember thin client -> desktop -> thin client -> desktop in the same cycle.
“But you have to pay for expensive technical experts to run your own computers, you don’t with AWS/Azure.”
That’s the usual comeback from the cloud true believers.
The essential message that AWS wants you to believe “Your company doesn’t have the skills to run computers, and you need no technical experts at all to use AWS”.
The cloud is where Moores Law goes to die - insanely expensive slow computers.
I was at Next '25 last week and sat through several meals with other executives who are on GCP. I was speechless at the comments made by one executive from a regional bank located in the South. He was quite cavalier in his commentary that firing all of their seasoned 'IT' pros and dissolution of their data centers was the best thing ever; going so far as to proudly claim they were all fired because those folks were purposefully torpedoing cloud migration to save their jobs.
Sitting next to him was a C-level executive from a public sector organization in one of the Mountain states lamenting the costs associated with their cloud deployments and lack of seasoned IT pros, due to the lack of ability to hire and retain IT professionals at the low wages allowed by budgetary constraint. While they could more easily gain limited investment from the state legislature for initiatives and the consulting companies advising them on strategy, they are now hamstrung by rising costs associated with what I call 'The Timeshare Points Model' where (overly-simplistically) $1 == 1 credit today but $2 == 1 credit tomorrow, even though--traditionally--compute and RAM costs go DOWN over time, not up, for the same level of service.
It was absolutely wild to me that there are still folks who truly believe that they can somehow save money without knowledgeable and thoughtful staff on hand to make smart decisions to run workloads in a cost-conscious manner and instead trust these cloud computing platforms to just do everything for them with unpredictable and ever-increasing cost.
From business perspective it's often hard to see these long-term lock-ins and potential effects of those. And hyperscalers focus in on creating narration where moving to the cloud "accelerates" your business. Sure, you don't need to deal with data center things, but eventually you still have people operating the cloud and it's just different kind of talent - but they are still FTEs you need to manage. So the business question remains on the ROI of the investment and currently data center investments bring very high ROI for those who dare.
It all makes sense when you realize those executives will be gone with cashed out bonuses by the time these decisions result in consequences.
heh. you also have to deal with mail theft when you have your own hardware. having a project delayed for 6 months because theives stole a shipment of solid state drives is something i don't want to go through again, lol
I told our VP of engineering the other day that the problem they're having is putting everything into locked-in/managed services when you should be owning your product.
The service I built has 99.99% availability, most of that was achieved by putting it in K8S clusters in multiple regions behind a CDN. Only managed service I rely on is SQL with better guaranteed uptime than I have (also way cheaper than doing it ourselves).
Aside from SQL, I can lift-and-shift almost all of our services at a moments notice. The only problem would be slightly degraded database query time, but we do a lot of caching in the clusters.