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The headline would be more accurately stated (according to an image in the article) "81% of IT teams directed to reduce or halt cloud spending growth" The most

The headline would be more accurately stated (according to an image in the article) "81% of IT teams directed to reduce or halt cloud spending growth" The most common response (39%) was the C suite wanted spending to remain the same.

ocdtrekkie 4y ago
The problem is that if your business is dependent on the cloud, that's not actually your choice: The providers can, and will, change the prices whenever they want. As the crunch comes and even the FAANGs start layoffs, watch how fast buying an in-house VMware stack seems like an absolute bargain, including paying staff to build and maintain it.
- jrumbut 4y ago
  I don't necessarily disagree. I've always felt that there was a lot to be said for not becoming dependent on the latest and greatest features of any specific cloud. If you're pushing the limits of some service you probably want to own it. But my real gripe is that this survey is being presented as doom and gloom when you could equally summarize the results as "about 60% of IT leaders directed to stay the course or beef up cloud spending"
- sofixa 4y ago
  > The problem is that if your business is dependent on the cloud, that's not actually your choice: The providers can, and will, change the prices whenever they want People often say this, but it's just not true. First, any company with significant spend has custom deals with custom pricing in exchange for a commit. Second, even if you don't have that, there's often reserved/"savings plans"/whatever where you commit in exchange for a lower price. Third, the only time any of the big 3 cloud providers has increased pricing (it usually only goes down) is when GCP increased bandwidth and storage costs a few months ago. AWS, which is what the majority of the market uses, has only decreased prices, hundreds of times. Regarding VMware, you know you have to pay for licenses and support in an ongoing manner and they are known to jack up prices, right? Furthermore, VMware's software is a dumpster fire that gets you around 5% of what you get from a serious public cloud. Maybe 30%-50% if you go in with NSX and vSAN and the vSuite where you lock in yourself to terrible software with the wrong abstractions, lack of APIs, at enormous inflexible costs. How is that any better?
- eb0la 4y ago
  If you have containerized loads, you're gonna need something more than just vanilla VMWare. Right now your choices are Tanzu ($$$), Rancher, RedHat Openshift on prem ($$$) or Ubuntu... Probably your savings will come from beign able to get bigger machines. After 4 years in the cloud I am still surprised to see how performant physical servers are.
- phpisthebest 4y ago
  There are 3 problems with that 1. Broadcom, if history is any indication, is about to make VMware much less of a bargain, likely exceeding the cost of the cloud, if not matching it. 2. Often time when a company moves to a cloud model, they lay off the traditional administration staff in favor of "DevOps", many many devops engineers would not have the first clue how to manage the low level infrastructure of Storage SAN, FiberChannel, vLAN's etc... let alone managing vSphere or hyperv, etc.. 3. Often times when a company moves to a cloud model they decommission their Onprem Hardware, Lead times right now are crazy still so any org wanted to move to OnPrem quickly is going to be hard pressed to do so.
  - ocdtrekkie 4y ago
    1. Definitely a concern, but Hyper-V is also free if you already license Windows. 2 and 3. Sounds like the decision to go to the cloud is going to hurt companies twice in the long run. Glad whatever CTO made that call got his bonuses and moved onto the next place already.
    - phpisthebest 4y ago
      Microsoft has stated many times they are "Cloud First" and hyperv development seems to be focused on Azure HyperV with limited features and improvements coming to OnPrem Hyperv, Hyperv for OnPrem still has ALOT of features missing even when comparied to linux based hypervisors let alone VMWare. It is also unclear what the long term path is for OnPrem Windows Server, many people believe in the next 5 years it will be replaced with some Variant of "Azure Stack" and will be billed on a subscription basis from hardware vendors, to Microsoft. The future is clear. Everything as a Service is coming for OnPrem, your network, storage, and hosts will all be some subscription model just like "cloud"
- EFreethought 4y ago
  I know we have had cloud for about a decade, but for a while I wondered if we would eventually see a sort of bait-and-switch: Cloud providers raising prices long after most corporations have lost the in-house expertise to run a data center. Granted, I have no idea how the costs compare. In every company I have been at, the higher-ups tell us in tech we have to "learn about the business side of things", yet the business side never wants to share information.
  - ocdtrekkie 4y ago
    Well, absolutely, but it's even worse than that: Cloud actually doesn't make sense for large, established companies. The benefits of quickly scaling up and down can make it worthwhile for a startup, but a company with a well-established business that has a predictable workload has no reason to pay extra for this. All of the large enterprises who have transitioned to cloud have really good sweetheart deals, often with additional ties to other business initiatives between the cloud provider and other enterprise. They know the savings they're getting is extremely short-term, and presumably they expect to re-acquire or retain the talent to leave eventually. Bear in mind, if you want an idea how little established enterprise values the cloud, in the year of our Lord 2022, the first automaker to transition to AWS is happening, announced last week: https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/13/23401350/bmw-amazon-web-service-cloud-software-connected-cars https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/13/23401350/bmw-amazon-web-... The way you can translate this is that if it took over a decade for the first automaker to transition to the leading cloud provider, few to no other auto manufacturers are outsourcing their data to the cloud. And I'm willing to bet BMW got a really epic deal to convince them to do it. The reason things like multi-cloud are so derided is that these companies' goals are to get you entirely dependent on their proprietary service design, so that it's too hard to ever leave. You can't go on-prem, you'd need to do a whole bunch of engineering to transition to a competitor's platform, etc. So you just suck it up and keep handing them a blank check every month.
Closi 4y ago
IMO I think that headline is less acccurate, because 'reduce growth' means 'grow, but less'.
- jrumbut 4y ago
  You're right, I forgot to change the percentage. The graphic doesn't even have a category for being directed to halt spend and less than half are being directed to reduce it in any way so I'm gonna say I still improved it ;)

ocdtrekkie 4y ago

The problem is that if your business is dependent on the cloud, that's not actually your choice: The providers can, and will, change the prices whenever they want. As the crunch comes and even the FAANGs start layoffs, watch how fast buying an in-house VMware stack seems like an absolute bargain, including paying staff to build and maintain it.

jrumbut 4y ago
I don't necessarily disagree. I've always felt that there was a lot to be said for not becoming dependent on the latest and greatest features of any specific cloud. If you're pushing the limits of some service you probably want to own it. But my real gripe is that this survey is being presented as doom and gloom when you could equally summarize the results as "about 60% of IT leaders directed to stay the course or beef up cloud spending"
sofixa 4y ago
> The problem is that if your business is dependent on the cloud, that's not actually your choice: The providers can, and will, change the prices whenever they want People often say this, but it's just not true. First, any company with significant spend has custom deals with custom pricing in exchange for a commit. Second, even if you don't have that, there's often reserved/"savings plans"/whatever where you commit in exchange for a lower price. Third, the only time any of the big 3 cloud providers has increased pricing (it usually only goes down) is when GCP increased bandwidth and storage costs a few months ago. AWS, which is what the majority of the market uses, has only decreased prices, hundreds of times. Regarding VMware, you know you have to pay for licenses and support in an ongoing manner and they are known to jack up prices, right? Furthermore, VMware's software is a dumpster fire that gets you around 5% of what you get from a serious public cloud. Maybe 30%-50% if you go in with NSX and vSAN and the vSuite where you lock in yourself to terrible software with the wrong abstractions, lack of APIs, at enormous inflexible costs. How is that any better?
eb0la 4y ago
If you have containerized loads, you're gonna need something more than just vanilla VMWare. Right now your choices are Tanzu ($$$), Rancher, RedHat Openshift on prem ($$$) or Ubuntu... Probably your savings will come from beign able to get bigger machines. After 4 years in the cloud I am still surprised to see how performant physical servers are.
phpisthebest 4y ago
There are 3 problems with that 1. Broadcom, if history is any indication, is about to make VMware much less of a bargain, likely exceeding the cost of the cloud, if not matching it. 2. Often time when a company moves to a cloud model, they lay off the traditional administration staff in favor of "DevOps", many many devops engineers would not have the first clue how to manage the low level infrastructure of Storage SAN, FiberChannel, vLAN's etc... let alone managing vSphere or hyperv, etc.. 3. Often times when a company moves to a cloud model they decommission their Onprem Hardware, Lead times right now are crazy still so any org wanted to move to OnPrem quickly is going to be hard pressed to do so.
- ocdtrekkie 4y ago
  1. Definitely a concern, but Hyper-V is also free if you already license Windows. 2 and 3. Sounds like the decision to go to the cloud is going to hurt companies twice in the long run. Glad whatever CTO made that call got his bonuses and moved onto the next place already.
  - phpisthebest 4y ago
    Microsoft has stated many times they are "Cloud First" and hyperv development seems to be focused on Azure HyperV with limited features and improvements coming to OnPrem Hyperv, Hyperv for OnPrem still has ALOT of features missing even when comparied to linux based hypervisors let alone VMWare. It is also unclear what the long term path is for OnPrem Windows Server, many people believe in the next 5 years it will be replaced with some Variant of "Azure Stack" and will be billed on a subscription basis from hardware vendors, to Microsoft. The future is clear. Everything as a Service is coming for OnPrem, your network, storage, and hosts will all be some subscription model just like "cloud"
EFreethought 4y ago
I know we have had cloud for about a decade, but for a while I wondered if we would eventually see a sort of bait-and-switch: Cloud providers raising prices long after most corporations have lost the in-house expertise to run a data center. Granted, I have no idea how the costs compare. In every company I have been at, the higher-ups tell us in tech we have to "learn about the business side of things", yet the business side never wants to share information.
- ocdtrekkie 4y ago
  Well, absolutely, but it's even worse than that: Cloud actually doesn't make sense for large, established companies. The benefits of quickly scaling up and down can make it worthwhile for a startup, but a company with a well-established business that has a predictable workload has no reason to pay extra for this. All of the large enterprises who have transitioned to cloud have really good sweetheart deals, often with additional ties to other business initiatives between the cloud provider and other enterprise. They know the savings they're getting is extremely short-term, and presumably they expect to re-acquire or retain the talent to leave eventually. Bear in mind, if you want an idea how little established enterprise values the cloud, in the year of our Lord 2022, the first automaker to transition to AWS is happening, announced last week: https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/13/23401350/bmw-amazon-web-service-cloud-software-connected-cars https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/13/23401350/bmw-amazon-web-... The way you can translate this is that if it took over a decade for the first automaker to transition to the leading cloud provider, few to no other auto manufacturers are outsourcing their data to the cloud. And I'm willing to bet BMW got a really epic deal to convince them to do it. The reason things like multi-cloud are so derided is that these companies' goals are to get you entirely dependent on their proprietary service design, so that it's too hard to ever leave. You can't go on-prem, you'd need to do a whole bunch of engineering to transition to a competitor's platform, etc. So you just suck it up and keep handing them a blank check every month.

Closi 4y ago

IMO I think that headline is less acccurate, because 'reduce growth' means 'grow, but less'.

jrumbut 4y ago
You're right, I forgot to change the percentage. The graphic doesn't even have a category for being directed to halt spend and less than half are being directed to reduce it in any way so I'm gonna say I still improved it ;)