Are rainy days ahead for cloud computing?

I don't think 37signals is a very strong example that this could become a trend. They are in the goldilocks zone where they're big and stable enough to save a lot of money with self-hosting, but not big enough that they can negotiate meaningful discounts with Amazon.

In reality cloud is too convenient, and the tradeoffs for self-hosting just don't make sense for the majority of companies. The talent to run your own servers with modern HA and reliability expectations has largely been consolidated into the giant cloud providers and other large companies at this point. As much as I think a lot of cloud is wasteful and more diversity would be beneficial, I don't see any meaningful change to cloud dominance on the horizon.

I hope so. We were considering migration from on premise to AWS or GCP. Did a couple of simulations, went with renewing hardware for our on premise. It was the right choice. Storage alone is almost 3 times more expensive on cloud, compared to a netapp appliance with financing... Stil using GCP for couple of use cases (e.g. BigQuery, Vertex), some backup infra, but 95% works on our hardware in rented racks.

cloud computing is way too expensive for what it is. you'll have most of the benefits with a managed database and a good cdn

Only in that the growth of cloud migrations might slow. The cloud is a great option for a lot of workloads and companies. Cloud native applications and services can be cost effective. Lift and shift is the most expensive way to go and can end up costing more than on-premise.

Any views or experiences evaluating OpenStack instead of one of the big ones AWS/Azure/GCP? OpenStack has a bad rep due to added complexity and limited developer tools that may lead to ultimately higher TCO but I wonder if this similar to what Linux was like roughly pre-2005 before becoming commercially robust and refined enough to replace many corporate-level server operating systems.

I would like to be able to use commodity hosted compute and storage and then build all the fancy stuff on top using open-source components. The generic providers like Linode are commodity at this point so this seems like the best of both worlds.

I have no confidence in my ability to configure Postgres on K8s with backups, however.

How many engineers does 3M buy? Enough to risk running your own hardware? Maybe.

I think so, but it's also funny to see some companies (my current included) struggling to get there to replace their on prem private Cloud, driven in large part by the VMware Broadcom situation.

The cloud isn't the right solution for everything, but I've been migrating infrastructure from on-prem to the cloud for ~10 years and it's saved money, simplified processes, and improved performance in every single case. I've also done a lot of work rearchitecting cloud infrastructure with the same effects.

It all comes down to architecture and design. Many applications aren't designed for the cloud, and of course those systems are costly and painful to run in the cloud.

If your workloads are creating such a massive gulf between the projected cost of on-prem vs cloud, you may need to look inward at the software or business itself.

Cloud will always be cheaper up to a point. I then question why that point needed to occur and if we couldn't find some new way to arrange the problem so that it stays under that point.

I feel like "on-prem is cheaper" is often one of those self-fulfilling prophecies where wanting it to be true makes it become true.

I have seen some amount of the needle flipping in the financial service space as well.

10 years ago you saw some first movers to cloud, the last 5 years have been a lot of followers for the sake of it (hey are smarter/bigger peers did it! - CTO).

Numerous shops have become a lot more selective on what workloads truly belong in the cloud. This might mean cancelling migrations or rolling workloads back. Many of these firms are large enough that they have historically operated their own DCs anyway. Others have simply rented space in places like equinix.

In a lot of ways this makes sense. JPM alone claims to have 50K "technologists". These are the kind of numbers that match or exceed the hyperscalers themselves. Even many of the big hedge funds / asset managers have only gotten bigger, with 1000+ engineers of various sorts on staff.

As others have pointed out, things like big predictable stable workloads and storage are heavily marked up in cloud and you are lighting money on fire at scale if you are already big enough to rent/run your own DC.

By Betteridge’s Law the answer is likely “no” ?