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

thenewstack.io

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

#101

Post by bob1029 »

I think control is maybe a bigger factor than cost these days. Being able to hold anyone accountable at all seems to be an operational superpower. Working with cloud vendor support is a torturous experience on a good day. It also doesn't matter how expensive the virtual machine is if there isn't one available to be provisioned.

I know it's kind of harsh, but owning the whole vertical and having the power to instantly fire anyone for giving an Azure-tier response is why these companies are doing it in my mind. Waiting on a 3rd party to find their own ass with a whole S&R team every time you need help is quite exhausting. I've never worked with an IT vendor and thought "damn these people are so responsive I can't dream of doing it better myself".

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

#102

Post by tg180 »

Agingcoder wrote: post #91
WaitWaitWha wrote: post #36

This is partially the result of cloud providers and partially business leadership. They, for whatever reason, insufficiently educated their clients on migration requirements. Lift & shift from on-premises to cloud only work for emergency. The shifted resources must be converted to cloud stack, or the cost will be multiples of on-prem costs. Business leadership was (is?) ignoring IT teams screaming of the problem with…

I keep reading ´ Lift and shift is bad ‘ on HN - what is the opposite of lift and shift ? ( ´cloud native ´ does not mean much to me). Is it that instead of oracle running on a rented vm you use whatever db your cloud provider is selling you, you move your monolith to a service oriented architecture running in k8s, etc ?

In simple terms, yes.

The term “native” refers to adopting the vendor’s technology stack, which typically includes managed data stores, containerized microservices, serverless functions, and immutable infrastructure.

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

#103

Post by michaelt »

bob1029 wrote: post #101

I think control is maybe a bigger factor than cost these days. Being able to hold anyone accountable at all seems to be an operational superpower. Working with cloud vendor support is a torturous experience on a good day. It also doesn't matter how expensive the virtual machine is if there isn't one available to be provisioned. I know it's kind of harsh, but owning the whole vertical and having the power to instantly…

In some regards, absolutely.

But remember even when you're doing everything on-prem with your own employees, you're still running software written by third parties.

So you might still have an unresponsive third party, just they might be a database vendor instead of a cloud vendor.

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

#104

Post by p_l »

cdchn wrote: post #88
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #84

GEICO is moving away from the cloud because their IT is a joke. They had a horrible on-prem infrastructure, so they moved to the cloud not knowing how, and they made the same mistakes in the cloud as on-prem, plus the usual mistakes every cloud migration runs into. They are moving away from the cloud because their new VP's entire career is focused on running her own hardware. What we know about their new setup is abs…

>K8s-on-OpenStack-on-K8s bonkers Do what now???

It's actually quite reasonable if for bad reasons.

TL;DR setting up OpenStack was so horrible I think SAP started deploying it through k8s.

So if you want to setup local "private cloud" kind of setup it makes sense to set up OpenStack on k8s.

If you then want to provide multiple clusters cloud-style to the rest of the organization... well, it's just layered again.

In fact, at least one significantly-sized european vendor in on-prem k8s space did exactly that kind of sandwich, to my knowledge.

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

#105

Post by maccard »

bob1029 wrote: post #101

I think control is maybe a bigger factor than cost these days. Being able to hold anyone accountable at all seems to be an operational superpower. Working with cloud vendor support is a torturous experience on a good day. It also doesn't matter how expensive the virtual machine is if there isn't one available to be provisioned. I know it's kind of harsh, but owning the whole vertical and having the power to instantly…

I work for a small orgthat is owned by a very large corp. Our spending is managed by large corp.

If I want to buy a $10 domain, the process takes a month and requires escalating to a purchasing director. If I want to rent a new server from hetzner, same thing.

If I want to spin up a bedrock instance for $1000/day on AWS - it’s already a line item in the budget so as long as I have a cost tag on the resource it’s pre-approved. As long as something is on the software catalog on AWS it’s ok to use.

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

#106

Post by maccard »

hylaride wrote: post #30
karmakaze wrote: post #22

It's a short simple post that comes down to this: > Weekly explains that “just running legacy applications in the cloud is prohibitively expensive,” highlighting how lift-and-shift approaches often fail to deliver expected benefits. Yes, if you have a mature business without active development at a scale where compute/storage costs is a substantial accounting line item, then it makes sense to run on hardware that doe…

I can't tell you how often I've run into cloud deployments that were lift-and-shifts, pushed on by bean counters wanting OPEX instead of CAPEX. They then run into actual cashflow expenses, less stability, more complex security (now you get IAM on top of basic networking!), and the ability for one underpaid person to easily do a lot of damage - because you're certainly not going to hire top-tier cloud talent - these a…

It’s a bit naive to think that this sort of an org went from hiring top tier sysadmin staff to bottom of the barrel developers for cloud dev. It’s likely they were a thundering mess when they managed their own hardware too.

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

#107

Post by vbezhenar »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #84

GEICO is moving away from the cloud because their IT is a joke. They had a horrible on-prem infrastructure, so they moved to the cloud not knowing how, and they made the same mistakes in the cloud as on-prem, plus the usual mistakes every cloud migration runs into. They are moving away from the cloud because their new VP's entire career is focused on running her own hardware. What we know about their new setup is abs…

The main problem with AWS is their outrageous pricing on some aspects like traffic. And some very unexpected pricing nuances which could burn thousands of dollars in a blink of an eye.

While AWS engineers are more competent, may be you don't need that much competency to run simple server or two. And expense structure will be more predictable.

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

#108

Post by viraptor »

p_l wrote: post #104
cdchn wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>K8s-on-OpenStack-on-K8s bonkers Do what now???

It's actually quite reasonable if for bad reasons. TL;DR setting up OpenStack was so horrible I think SAP started deploying it through k8s. So if you want to setup local "private cloud" kind of setup it makes sense to set up OpenStack on k8s. If you then want to provide multiple clusters cloud-style to the rest of the organization... well, it's just layered again. In fact, at least one significantly-sized european ve…

Openstack on k8s is basically giving up on openstack on openstack. https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/TripleO You need some kind of orchestration for the control plane. Either you create it from scratch or use something existing.

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

#109

Post by darkwater »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #84

GEICO is moving away from the cloud because their IT is a joke. They had a horrible on-prem infrastructure, so they moved to the cloud not knowing how, and they made the same mistakes in the cloud as on-prem, plus the usual mistakes every cloud migration runs into. They are moving away from the cloud because their new VP's entire career is focused on running her own hardware. What we know about their new setup is abs…

> Almost every argument against the cloud - cost inefficiency, fear of vendor lock-in, etc - has easy solutions that make the whole thing extremely cost competitive, if not a way better value, than trying to become your own cloud hosting provider. It's very hard to estimate the real world costs, both known and unknown, of DIY hosting (specifically the expertise, or lack of it, and the impacts from doing it wrong, which is very likely to happen if cloud hosting isn't your core business)

Please define your concept of self-hosting here. Does it mean you need to have your very own DC? Renting a few racks that you fill yourself? Rent CPU, storage and networking, with remote hands and all the bells and whistles? Depending on the scenario it changes dramatically the burden of ownership (at a monetary cost, obviously). And depending on the size of the company and the variability of the workload, it can (or can not) make sense to be on-prem. But being like "cloud is perfect for everyone and everything, if you tune it well enough" seems a bit too much black&white to me.

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

#110

Post by viraptor »

tomcam wrote: post #99
roydivision wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have, and least power. I worked in a DC with 4 very large diesel generators, each backed up by a multi-ton flywheel that managed the transition between a power cut and the generators taking over. Area wide power cut, winter afternoon so it was already getting dark. The two signs I knew there was something wrong were that all the lights went out outside, ie other businesses, street lighting etc. And my internet conn…

Amazing story, and now the flywheel is living rent free in a steampunk-inspired corner of my brain. What are these called so I can look them up on the net? Like this maybe? https://www.torus.co/torus-flywheel

They're chonky devices which were not really off-the-shelf until the last decade, as far as I know. There's very few images of them, but a smaller one looks like this: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2018/03/14/pilot-project-for-fly...
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