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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

#181

Post by leftcenterright »

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.

> Their Cloud exodus can't have been more than a few dozen servers, right?

"At the moment we have somewhere between 20-25 servers in each cab, or about 90 servers in each site. Here’s what the rack layout looks like in Chicago, for instance."

- https://dev.37signals.com/37signals-datacenter-overview/

Their "server count" is definitely much higher than what you are thinking.

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

#182

Post by ghaering »

travem wrote: post #83
tiffanyh wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that AWS is doing $100B in annual revenue and still growing at 17% YoY ... and they do NOT have a collaboration suite (office/gsuite) - it'd say at least for AWS it's nearly all IaaS/PaaS. https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/01/amazon_q1_2024/

It may not be as popular but they do have Amazon WorkDocs > Amazon WorkDocs is a document storage, collaboration, and sharing system. Amazon WorkDocs is fully managed, secure, and enterprise scale. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/workdocs/latest/developerguide/w...

This service has been discontinued recently, with a bunch of others that lacked adoption from customers.

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

#183

Post by p_l »

viraptor wrote: post #108
p_l wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am totally unsurprised people gave up on Triple-O.

I haven't personally worked on OpenStack setups myself, but my coworkers in few places did (including supporting if not actually being contracted out to build some of the commercial offerings in that space) and especially upgrades were always this huge project where it made more sense to tear down the entire setup and bring it up again.

That was made easier with OpenStack packaged as docker containers, but ansible was arguably still more pain to setup the cluster than just using k8s.

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

#184

Post by randomcarbloke »

thrw42A8N wrote: post #124
hggigg wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wise person. Wish we hadn't. Managed to multiply costs 8x (no joke).

No way that is true if you did it properly. Practically nobody has a workload where this could be true - and it's definitely not a workload smaller than several DCs. It doesn't work out well if you just create some long lived EC2 instances and call it a day. But that's not really using a cloud, just a VPS - and that has indeed never been cheaper than having your own servers. You need to go cloud native if you want to…

there is absolutely a crossover point at which it would've made more sense to stay put.

My organisation is feeling it now and while our cloud environment isn't fully optimised it has been designed with cost in mind.

Using opex to make up for otherwise unjustifiable capex is suitable only in the beginning or if you need the latest servers every six (or whatever) months

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

#185

Post by nottorp »

tommica wrote: post #178
inkyoto wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lock-in. So do DO, OVH, Hetzner, Azure, GCP, Oracle, IBM etc. Every cloud platform comes with a hard lock-in.

Pretty sure those lockins are not comparable

He's mixing plain hosting with "advanced"/"cloud" hosting.

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

#186

Post by vel0city »

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…

> now you get IAM on top of basic networking!

You always had IAM even on prem. Just before IAM meant admin:admin everywhere with domain admin creds for everyone and an NPS that nobody knew how to configure so they beat it with a wrench until things started working a decade ago.

Ah, the good old days.

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

#187

Post by toss1 »

roydivision wrote: post #166
tomcam wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very cool. Somehow I missed the idea of flywheels used to store energy. I assumed one that small would peter out in seconds.

These were huge. In fact iirc the power that came into the building spun them, and the DC ran off the resultant generated electricity. So the risk at cutover is minimal, there is in fact no loss of electricity unless the wheel drops below the required revs. One of these units blew at one point. We had 4 and only needed two running, so no big deal. The company who managed the whole thing (Swiss) came to replace it. Am…

Much smaller-scale, but I worked at a company with a mini-mainframe-type computer (VAX-11/780, iirc) that had a 'motor-generator' to run it (really a motor-flywheel-generator).

The computer, storage, etc. ran off the generator, which first eliminated any risk of power spikes and surges (as the flywheel is a very effective low-pass filter), and the circuits controlling motor speed also ensured the AC frequency was better than the power company supply. This was located in a rural area, so the long power lines with few sinks (customers pulling power) made lightening spike risk spread further, and the rural voltage and frequency fluctuated a lot. Seemed like a really cool system that worked flawlessly in the years I was there.

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

#188

Post by roncesvalles »

tommica wrote: post #179
roncesvalles wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My opinion from analyzing the 37signals cloud offboard case is that it shouldn't have been done. They didn't save a whole lot of money from it (they aren't spending a whole lot on it anyway), and now their business ever so slightly loses focus. Not to mention, as you said, the quality aspects. Cloud gives you many things "for free" (like local disk RAID, network and power redundancy, datacenter compliance, in-transit…

Umm, millions saved in the future seems like a decent amount of money? Yeah, they paid for the hardware in year 0 that equals to their AWS bill, but the subsequent years that money is not spent on aws or new servers

Although it's private so we can never be sure, their revenue seems to be in the ballpark of $100m with about 40% margin. So even if they save a million per year, it's not worth it, especially when it's a trade-off.

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

#189

Post by tomcam »

toss1 wrote: post #187
roydivision wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These were huge. In fact iirc the power that came into the building spun them, and the DC ran off the resultant generated electricity. So the risk at cutover is minimal, there is in fact no loss of electricity unless the wheel drops below the required revs. One of these units blew at one point. We had 4 and only needed two running, so no big deal. The company who managed the whole thing (Swiss) came to replace it. Am…

Much smaller-scale, but I worked at a company with a mini-mainframe-type computer (VAX-11/780, iirc) that had a 'motor-generator' to run it (really a motor-flywheel-generator). The computer, storage, etc. ran off the generator, which first eliminated any risk of power spikes and surges (as the flywheel is a very effective low-pass filter), and the circuits controlling motor speed also ensured the AC frequency was bet…

Elegant! Flywheel as line conditioner. Most cool.

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

#190

Post by ravedave5 »

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…

> it’s so much faster to click a few buttons than to go through the hardware acquisition processes at many enterprises.

My companies on prem requisition process used to be so horrifically bad that it forced ball of mud solutions because nobody had time to wait 9 months for new servers. Also we had scaling issues and we couldn't react in any timely manner. I feel like its a penny wise pound foolish approach to stay on prem.

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