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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

#191

Post by fuzzfactor »

>Cloud repatriation is undoubtedly not for start-ups or scale-ups still on their way to profitability or product-market fit. For such companies, the cloud abstracts all the complexity of IT infrastructure and lets their teams focus on the business challenges.

Hmm, what about companies that are expected to be stronger-than-average in computer science & software engineering, and might not yet have as much competitive advantage in business momentum or financial resources to begin with?

Would it be better to leverage the strongest area of expertise or not?

Tough decision, which I would be very conservative about making.

Decade 0 of The Cloud didn't obscure very much of the heavens and it remained sunny with only a slight chance of scattered data.

Now on first pass (decade 01) it looks like the cloud is ideal if you have huge amounts of data that needs to be shared with just about anybody anywhere at any time 24/7.

I know I'm not in that league, so I can't speak from a position of expertise, but after this much dust has settled it does look like it would be most widely useful mainly for data which is not the least bit confidential.

Especially data which is completely public, or intended to be public more so than was possible any other way.

And then only as long as the ongoing cost is "virtually" insignificant compared to the fully amortized on-premises in-house alternative.

Seems like it would really make sense to do this kind of financial analysis before deciding how to best handle the data that you want the world to have access to.

Probably a good idea to consider how to best handle the other kind of data that you don't ever want to share with the world at all, which is a whole different equation. Any cloud in the way and it may be more challenging to break through the ceiling for the sky to be the limit on that one.

At least this seems to be the kind of thing that has been consistent since the overcast started rolling in.

But what do I know?

I'm just an earth-bound observer ;)

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

#192

Post by throw_m239339 »

It comes down to cost, especially cost predictability. And now businesses have more "expertise" to manage their servers after all these years. Obvously, not everything is migrated out of the cloud.

Cloud used to be cheap... it clearly isn't anymore.

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

#193

Post by keernan »

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…

I know nothing about Geico's IT but I find your comments surprising. GEICO is one of the most profitable insurance companies in the world which, of course, is the end goal of every company.

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

#194

Post by roydivision »

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…

I'm realising, with my limited understanding of electronics, that the flywheel acts in these cases as a capacitor, albeit a frickin' huge mechanical one.

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

#195

Post by mrbungie »

inkyoto wrote: post #172
mbreese wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hetzner, OVH or even DO aren't even close to offering what AWS offers But I think the argument is - do they need to be? How much of the services of AWS (Google/azure/etc) are really needed by the majority of customers? For companies that need hyperscaling services, I get it. There are definite benefits to the cloud when operating at extremes (auto scaling up and down). But for the majority of workloads, I think you…

> How much of the services of AWS (Google/azure/etc) are really needed by the majority of customers? Very many. And none of them are EC2 (or its equivalent). Any service that comes with the consumption based charging (i.e. no 24x7 running costs whether it is used or not) and offers a clearly defined functional feature, has plenty of appeal to cloud customers. Another part of the appeal is the mix and match nature of…

Never seen the "operational overhead elimination" really happen in the wild. Sure, you lose the N Sysadmins, you gain at least N+1 SREs/Cloud/DevOps Engineers.

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

#196

Post by Brain_Man »

umur wrote: post #169
ksec wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

37signals spends more than $3M a year on cloud. So while it definitely isn't a major enterprise. It is also a lot more than a a few dozen servers. I am not anti-cloud and pro cloud. My major problem with the new trend is that a lot of people are basically rediscovering pre "Cloud" era. which is VPS, Dedicated server and Colocation. And people are suggesting Hetzner or OVH or many other players are equivalent to AWS.…

There is indeed a large gap in the market between outsourcing all your infrastructure to Hyperscalers vs. hosting it on DIY-bare-metal and/or VPC providers. An open source alternative to AWS would do much to fill that gap, and we are building just that at Ubicloud (I'm one of the co-founders). So far with Ubicloud, you get virtual machines, load balancers, private networking, managed PostgreSQL, all with encryption a…

> You can set it up yourself on these providers or you can use our managed service.

Are all the bits and pieces necessary for starting one's own managed service open source? In case somebody is interested in starting their own commercial cloud. How easy would that be to deploy?

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

#197

Post by BackBlast »

cyberax wrote: post #82
efitz wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

> Cloud providers can also over-provision But they don't. AWS overprovisions only on T-type instances (T3,T4,T5). The rest of the instance types don't share cores or memory between tenants. I know, I worked with the actual AWS hardware at Amazon :) AWS engineers have always been pretty paranoid about security, so they limit the hardware sharing between tenants as much as possible. For example, AWS had been strictly l…

Seems par for the course that even AWS employees don't even understand their pricing. I noticed the pricing similarity and tried to deploy to .metal instances. And that's when I got hit with additional charges.

If you turn on a .metal instance, your account will be billed (at least) $2/hr for the privilege for every region in which you do so. A fact I didn't know until I had racked up more charges than expected. So many junk fees hiding behind every checkbox on the platform.

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

#198

Post by lucidguppy »

vbezhenar wrote: post #107
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.

Right here - network is expensive. Another issue is cost estimation.

Servers have prices, rack space has prices, engineers have salaries.

You now literally have people hired now to work on how to calculate infra costs on aws (finops). Spot prices fluctuate. So what are the real savings in FTEs?

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

#199

Post by sekh60 »

Brain_Man wrote: post #196
umur wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is indeed a large gap in the market between outsourcing all your infrastructure to Hyperscalers vs. hosting it on DIY-bare-metal and/or VPC providers. An open source alternative to AWS would do much to fill that gap, and we are building just that at Ubicloud (I'm one of the co-founders). So far with Ubicloud, you get virtual machines, load balancers, private networking, managed PostgreSQL, all with encryption a…

> You can set it up yourself on these providers or you can use our managed service. Are all the bits and pieces necessary for starting one's own managed service open source? In case somebody is interested in starting their own commercial cloud. How easy would that be to deploy?

There's OpenStack. It's a private IaaS. Had loadbalancers, ipv6 support, support for K8s hosting via the magnum component (and other container orchestrators), HA via Masakari component. The networking is very flexible. It does not currently have functions as a service, I believe that was in the Senlin component, but that's been abandoned, I believe a new incarnation of the idea is in the works though. With something like Kolla-ansible a containerized OpenStack infrastructure is pretty damn easy to manage, upgrades are just making sure you make any needded changes in the global config file (just a vimdiff with the new sample one included in the release) and then literally just a kolla-ansible upgrade -i inventory-file.yml.

I'm just a home labber and I've run OpenStack via kolla-ansible for like 7 years now, and Ceph since the jewel release I think almost 8 years ago for storage. Both are pretty easy to manage.

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