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Why Companies Are Ditching the Cloud: The Rise of Cloud Repatriation

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Re: Why Companies Are Ditching the Cloud: The Rise of Cloud Repatriation

#71

Post by SoftTalker »

doubled112 wrote: post #51
jimt1234 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never worked in a data center that did cooling and power correctly. Everyone thinks they're doing it right, and then street power gets cut - there's significant impact, ops teams scramble to contain, and finally there's the finger-pointing.

The colo I’m used to has survived multiple switch overs to backup and then to diesel generators without a blip that I could detect. I say “I’m used to” because having things there has spanned more than one job. One power outage was days to a week. Don’t recall exactly. It’s possible to do it right.

Yes it's possible. But it's not cheap. If you buy a bunch of UPS and a few generators (you need more than one, in case it doesn't start) and don't maintain them regularly and test them regularly that's when you get some bad surprises.

Re: Why Companies Are Ditching the Cloud: The Rise of Cloud Repatriation

#73

Post by kreims »

WaxProlix wrote: post #6
jsnell wrote: post #4

I don't know that 37Signals counts as a "major enterprise". Their Cloud exodus can't have been more than a few dozen servers, right? Meanwhile AWS is growing at 20%/year, Azure at 33% and GCP at 35%. That doesn't seem compatible with any kind of major cloud repatriation trend.

How much of that is what technologists would consider "cloud" (IAAS, PAAS) versus what someone on the business side of things would consider "cloud" - office365, google gsuite, etc?

I’d suspect there is significant growth of businesses acting as intermediaries for cloud storage. I think that other software providers have also realized that ransoming users data is a great way to extract predictable, hedge-fund-owner-pleasing revenue without performing useful work.

AEC software providers all do this. ProjectWise is worse than owning or renting a plain file server in every way I can imagine, yet every consultant in transportation dutifully cuts Bentley a five-figure check or larger every year so they can hold your project files hostage and pretend to develop software.

I pray for a merciful asteroid to end it all.

Re: Why Companies Are Ditching the Cloud: The Rise of Cloud Repatriation

#74

Post by windexh8er »

panrobo wrote: post #32
jsnell wrote: post #4

I don't know that 37Signals counts as a "major enterprise". Their Cloud exodus can't have been more than a few dozen servers, right? Meanwhile AWS is growing at 20%/year, Azure at 33% and GCP at 35%. That doesn't seem compatible with any kind of major cloud repatriation trend.

aws and other hyperscalers will keep growing, no doubt. Public cloud adoption is at around 20%. So the new companies that migrate into the cloud will keep the growth going. That doesn't deny the fact that some might be repatriating though. Especially ones that couldn't get the benefits out of the cloud.

One thing I've seen in every startup I've been in over the last decade is that cloud asset management is relatively poor. Now I'm not certain that enterprise is better or worse, but ultimately when I think back 10+ years ago resources were finite. With that limitation came self-imposed policing of utilization.

Looking at cloud infrastructure today it is very easy for organizations to lose sight on production vs frivolous workloads. I happen to work for an automation company that has cloud infrastructure monitoring deployed such that we get notified about the resources we've deployed and can terminate workloads via ChatOps. Even though I know that everyone in the org is continuously nagged about these workloads I still see tons of resources deployed that I know are doing nothing or could be commingled on an individual instance. But, since the cloud makes it easy to deploy we seem to gravitate towards creating a separation of work efforts by just deploying more.

This is/was rampant in every organization I've been a part of for the last decade with respect to cloud. The percentage of actual required, production workloads in a lot of these types of accounts is, I'd gather, less than 50% in many cases. And so I really do wonder how many organizations are just paying the bill. I would gather the Big cloud providers know this based on utilization metrics and I wonder how much cloud growth is actually stagnant workloads piling up.

Re: Why Companies Are Ditching the Cloud: The Rise of Cloud Repatriation

#75

Post by efitz »

cyberax wrote: post #48
efitz wrote: post #40

There are certain workloads that have never been really economical to run in cloud. Cloud economics is based on multi-tenancy, eg if you have a lot of hardware that is sitting idle a lot of the time, then cloud may be economical for you as the cloud provider can share it between you and others. Cloud is also good for episodic use of expensive exotic systems like HPC and GPU fleets, if you don’t need them all the time…

> but if you want dedicated instances or bare metal Multitenant instances on AWS statically partition the hardware (CPU, RAM, network), so tenants don't really share all that much. Memory bandwidth is probably the only really affected resource. > Second, they don’t constrain random usage enough. AWS now has billing alerts with per-hour resolution and automatic anomaly detection. There are third-party tools that do th…

> Multitenant instances on AWS statically partition the hardware (CPU, RAM, network), so tenants don't really share all that much.

You are missing several points:

First, density. Cloud providers have huge machines that can run lots of VMs, and AWS in particular uses hardware (”Nitro”) for hypervisor functionality so they have very low overhead.

Cloud providers also don’t do “hardware” partitioning for many instance types. AWS sells “VCPUs” as the capacity unit; this is not necessarily a core, it may be time on a core.

Cloud providers can also over-provision; like airlines can sell more seats than exist on a plane, cloud providers can sell more VCPUs than cores on a machine, assuming (correctly) that the vast majority of instances will be idle most of the time, and they can manage noisy neighbors via live migration.

And lots of other more esoteric stuff.

Re: Why Companies Are Ditching the Cloud: The Rise of Cloud Repatriation

#76

Post by efitz »

teyc wrote: post #55
efitz wrote: post #40

There are certain workloads that have never been really economical to run in cloud. Cloud economics is based on multi-tenancy, eg if you have a lot of hardware that is sitting idle a lot of the time, then cloud may be economical for you as the cloud provider can share it between you and others. Cloud is also good for episodic use of expensive exotic systems like HPC and GPU fleets, if you don’t need them all the time…

Most enterprises on prem already run VMware for virtualisation, it is the antiquated way of provisioning that affects how slow it is to spin something up on prem. And frequently these antiquated practices are carried to the cloud, negating any benefit.

> And frequently these antiquated practices are carried to the cloud, negating any benefit.

I should have brought that up too. Airlifting your stuff to the cloud and expecting cloud to run like your data center is a way to set yourself up for disappointment and expense. The cloud is something very different than your on-premise datacenter and many things that make sense on prem, do not make sense in cloud.

Re: Why Companies Are Ditching the Cloud: The Rise of Cloud Repatriation

#77

Post by weikju »

denkmoon wrote: post #49

It doesn't seem to say in the article and it's not really discussed in these "LEAVING THE CLOUDS!!" articles, but what are these orgs doing for on-prem? Given the broadcom acquisition of vmware, rebuilding massive vsphere clusters like it's 2010 doesn't seem like a good long term play. Are they moving to kubernetes? Some other hypervisor?

At least in the case of 37signals, they went with colocated servers, some type of KVM and their own tool, Kamal, for containerized deployments without the complexity of kubernetes.

You can find one post here with many links at the bottom

https://basecamp.com/cloud-exit

Re: Why Companies Are Ditching the Cloud: The Rise of Cloud Repatriation

#78

Post by adamc »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #54
jsnell wrote: post #4

I don't know that 37Signals counts as a "major enterprise". Their Cloud exodus can't have been more than a few dozen servers, right? Meanwhile AWS is growing at 20%/year, Azure at 33% and GCP at 35%. That doesn't seem compatible with any kind of major cloud repatriation trend.

"In parallel, GEICO, one of the largest automotive insurers in the United States, is actively repatriating many workloads from the cloud as part of a comprehensive architectural overhaul." Is GEICO a major enterprise

Per google, more than 30,000 employees, so I'd say enterprise-scale, sure. One of the biggest? No, but not tiny or even medium-sized.

Re: Why Companies Are Ditching the Cloud: The Rise of Cloud Repatriation

#79

Post by Salgat »

packetlost wrote: post #45
Salgat wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We went to cloud because 1) we only need 3 infra guys to run our entire platform and 2) we can trivially scale up or down as needed. The first saves us hundreds of thousands in skilled labor and the second lets us take on new customers with thousands of agents in a matter of days without having to provision in advance.

1) You may more than pay for that labor in cloud costs, but you can also pretty easily operate rented dedicated hardware with a 3-man team if they know how to do it, the tools to scale are there they're just different. 2) I don't know what your setup looks like, but renting a dedicated server off of Hetzner takes a few minutes, maybe hours at most. My personal opinion is that most workloads that have a load balancer…

Just to clarify, AWS lets you provision bare-metal too if your goal is to just rent hardware someone else is maintaining. And things like trivially distributing load and storage across multiple datacenters/regions is another big bonus for us.
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