Kjell'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.
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.
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
#42I would guess that all of these companies that are moving back are throwing in the towel on their cloud migration/modernization plans under the guise of "repatriation" when it's really poor execution without any responsibility.
Re: Why Companies Are Ditching the Cloud: The Rise of Cloud Repatriation
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given that AWS is doing $100B in annual revenue and still growing at 17% YoY ... and they do NOT have a collaboration suite (office/gsuite) - it'd say at least for AWS it's nearly all IaaS/PaaS. https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/01/amazon_q1_2024/
I'd agree on IaaS/PaaS being the main driver. Id guess that everyone is running away from serverless offerings from all the main cloud providers. It's just day 1 lock in to a platform with no shared standards. It's very uncompetitive and kind of slow to innovate.
One has an issue with the platform-enforced HTTP timeout maximum values.
I migrated that app back to a VM in an hour.
It turns out that the “integration” for something like App Service (or CloudRun or whatever) is mostly just best practices for any kind of hosting: parameters read from environment variables, immutable binaries with external config, stateless servers, read only web app folders, monitoring with APMs, etc…
Sure, you’ll experience lockin if you use Durable Functions or the similar Lambda features… but no worse than any other workflow or business rules platform.
Ask people how easy it is to get off BizTalk or MuleSoft…
Re: Why Companies Are Ditching the Cloud: The Rise of Cloud Repatriation
#44What I was surprised to find in some big orgs is the processes have not evolved to be cloud first. There is lack of maturity, still a chain of committees, approvals, and manual processes; risk management still treats the services as a giant intranet, deployments are not scripted, ad hoc designs. Resources are placed in vnets so that they resemble a system they already know, and comes with all the associated risks.
Re: Why Companies Are Ditching the Cloud: The Rise of Cloud Repatriation
#45You can have a 100Gb uplink on a dedicated fibre for less than 1000$/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.
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.
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 anyways would be best suited to a mix of dedicated/owned infrastructure for baseline operation and dynamic scaling to a cloud for burst. The downsides to that approach are it requires all of skillset A (systems administration, devops) and some amount of skillset B (public cloud), and the networking constraints can be challenging depending on how state is managed.
Re: Why Companies Are Ditching the Cloud: The Rise of Cloud Repatriation
#46Kjell'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.
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.
Or the electrician doing maintenance on the backup generator doesn't properly connect the bypass and no one notices until he disconnects the generator and the entire DC instantly goes quiet.
Or your DC provisions rack space without knowing which servers are redundant with which other servers, and suddenly when two services go from 10% CPU use to 100% CPU across ten servers the breaker for that circuit gives up entirely and takes down your entire business.
Re: Why Companies Are Ditching the Cloud: The Rise of Cloud Repatriation
#47You 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.
Re: Why Companies Are Ditching the Cloud: The Rise of Cloud Repatriation
#48There 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…
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 the same.
Re: Why Companies Are Ditching the Cloud: The Rise of Cloud Repatriation
#49Re: Why Companies Are Ditching the Cloud: The Rise of Cloud Repatriation
#50"Major organizations like 37signals and GEICO". Sorry, what? Citing two companies? And how does a $37bn company compare to 37signals? Such an odd pair of companies to choose. Is DHH friends with the author? I'd be more interested in statistics about total cloud vs onprem spend across all companies, over time, to support assertion that "companies are ditching the cloud" A very poor article