You can have a 100Gb uplink on a dedicated fibre for less than 1000$/month now. Which is insanely less than cloud bandwidth. Of course there are tons of other costs, but that alone can suffice to justify moving out of the cloud for bandwidth intensive app.
Why Companies Are Ditching the Cloud: The Rise of Cloud Repatriation
21–30 of 202 posts
Re: Why Companies Are Ditching the Cloud: The Rise of Cloud Repatriation
#22It'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 doesn't have the flexibility and cost of the cloud.
There is an in-between that makes much more sense for most though. Running on provisioned bare metal. Lots of providers offer this as a better performance/price option where you don't have to deal with provisioning hardware but do everything else from the OS+maintenance and up.
At one company we used large bare-metal machine instances provisioned for stable parts of the application architecture (e.g. database and webapp instances) and the cloud for new development where it made sense to leverage capabilities, e.g. DynamoDB with cross-region replication.
Re: Why Companies Are Ditching the Cloud: The Rise of Cloud Repatriation
#23I 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?
For Azure, all of it. Microsoft clumps Azure together with their server software (e.g. Windows Server, SQL Server) licensing when reporting the revenue, but give more fine-grained information on growth rates. This is the latter. (We also know the Azure business was already massive at $34 billion in 2022, since it got revealed during one of Microsoft's ongoing antitrust cases.)
For Google, I'm not aware of a reliable way of estimating the GCP vs. Workspace numbers. But they get asked it during earnings calls, and the answer has always been that the GCP growth is substantially faster than the Workspace growth.
Re: Why Companies Are Ditching the Cloud: The Rise of Cloud Repatriation
#24Kjell's Law: the cost of a platform eventually exceeds the cost of the one it replaced. But each cost is in a different budget. We seem to have replaced cooling and power and a grumpy sysadmin with storage and architects and unhappy developers.
We had happy developers before? Amazing.
Re: Why Companies Are Ditching the Cloud: The Rise of Cloud Repatriation
#25The article is incredibly thin on details. In my experience, it comes down to two factors: 1. Egress cost. Cloud hosting providers have absolutely insane egress pricing. It's beyond stupid at this point, if you want to host anything bandwidth-intensive. 2. Storage pricing.
"Storage is cheap, but moving it ain't" is a quote a former co-worker frequently liked to remind people. The quote applied at the low level (eg between CPUs and their caches) all the way up to networking.
Anyways, cloud provider egress costs can be ridiculous. Amazon charges for egress transfer out of AWS, then quite a bit for NAT gateway transfer, and AWS network firewall on top of that (we dropped the firewall and moved our bulk traffic to a specific outer subnet because of that). Oh, and you can't give many serverless products (eg lambda) elastic IPs, so out the NAT gateway it goes...
So. Frustrating.
Re: Why Companies Are Ditching the Cloud: The Rise of Cloud Repatriation
#26I 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.
> That doesn't seem compatible with any kind of major cloud repatriation trend.
Agreed. I don't think this is a real trend, at least not right now.
Also, fwiw, I'm really not a fan of these types of articles that identify like a small handful of people or organizations doing something different and calling it a "trend".
Re: Why Companies Are Ditching the Cloud: The Rise of Cloud Repatriation
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
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/
Not to naysay, any idea of that includes their own website? Just curious. I don’t az itself is the largest aws customer anymore.
Re: Why Companies Are Ditching the Cloud: The Rise of Cloud Repatriation
#28What I was surprised to find in some big orgs is the processes have not evolved to be cloud first. There is lack of maturity, still a chain of committees, approvals, and manual processes; risk management still treats the services as a giant intranet, deployments are not scripted, ad hoc designs. Resources are placed in vnets so that they resemble a system they already know, and comes with all the associated risks.
Re: Why Companies Are Ditching the Cloud: The Rise of Cloud Repatriation
#29They will want cloud-like APIs on-premises and most will implement OpenStack. The second wave of migrations to the cloud will be even quicker for these companies making their way back to on premises.
Re: Why Companies Are Ditching the Cloud: The Rise of Cloud Repatriation
#30It'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 are bean counters running things after all.
It makes it really clear why you so many data leaks via badly configured s3 buckets of dynamo tables...