9 ms·

The cloud backlash has begun: Why big data is pulling compute back on premises

185 points by taubek 4y ago

taylodl 4y ago
That's great. Wait until they see the lead times for getting new infrastructure. And you need to rack and stack those servers somewhere. And you need to ensure that data is backed-up. And you need to ensure you have a DR environment setup so if your primary location is taken out by a local weather calamity you're not SOL for days/weeks/months. And you need the staff to manage and take care of all these things. And don't forget patching. You have to keep everything patched and up-to-date. And don't forget coverage. People have this thing about taking vacations. Also, setting big data compute infrastructure is a bit different than traditional server infrastructure, if one has never done it before. Your compute, storage, and network infrastructure are critical components and need to be designed and tuned together. I know. We did it. And now some 7 years later we've moved it all to the cloud.
imwillofficial 4y ago
Yeah, this so called backlash is a fantasy.
ary 4y ago
This is not what we're seeing (disclosure, I'm a founder at a cloud-cost management startup). Momentum is still towards the cloud, with some exceptions, given the amount of talent available to deploy there versus on-prem. The "move" to on-prem is like the "move" to alternate or hybrid clouds: it's a negotiation tactic with AWS et al. When it's time to negotiate your enterprise discount program, savings plan(s), etc., etc. you need leverage, and that's what this is. Some companies spend multiple hundreds of millions of dollars with AWS alone and at that cost any and every tactic to bring down spend will get deployed.
- jamesblonde 4y ago
  That's your experience. We had a global network operator talk to us about repatriating its ML workloads on-premises from Azure. Cost is the main factor, sure.
  - gumby 4y ago
    Azure has an on prem version to facilitate (and monetize) that transition. I don’t like Azure and won’t use them again but this seems like a smart approach for MS to take.
- bklyn11201 4y ago
  Even with the discounts, savings plans, multi-year commit discounts, etc., the cloud costs are absolutely absurd if you are running stable applications where you understand the future growth, use, and demand. Yes, the cloud is the right place for 99% of apps out there, but the market is sending a clear objective out to all tech companies: become profitable and build a sustainable, high margin on your products. Every maturing company with predictable products must be exploring ways to move workloads out of the cloud. AWS took your margin and isn't giving it back. https://a16z.com/2021/05/27/cost-of-cloud-paradox-market-cap-cloud-lifecycle-scale-growth-repatriation-optimization/ https://a16z.com/2021/05/27/cost-of-cloud-paradox-market-cap...
  - wmfiv 4y ago
    Dropbox (from the a16z article) to me is the exception that proves the point. What percentage of COGS is your cloud/infstracture spend? If your products don't look like cloud infrastructure (aka Dropbox), it better be very small. If you think cloud is costing you 1000% what it would cost on-premise, that's almost certainly a spend and architectural discipline problem, not a cloud problem.
    - marcosdumay 4y ago
      Hum... A 1000% overhead looks typical to me. Whether that's an important saving or not changes from business to business, but anything less than 1000% seems only achievable by customized discounts from the cloud provider.
      - throwaway894345 4y ago
        I feel like this is comparing some cost-optimized on-prem scenario with a "idgaf, I'm prioritizing growth over cost savings" cloud scenario. Every company I've worked at has been way more concerned with growth to the point that the cloud spend is wildly careless, but we could easily reduce it by a factor of 10 with dramatically less effort than it would take to move on prem.
        deleted 4y ago
- unity1001 4y ago
  > (disclosure, I'm a founder at a cloud-cost management startup) Isnt it natural that your service gains more users at this time when everyone is trying to cut down on cloud costs... Cloud usage may be declining, but those who are still using it would want to cut costs...
- red-iron-pine 4y ago
  There is still a lot of momentum because the 2nd and 3rd wave have yet to be burned. Pre-COVID I was a at a F500 that had gotten screwed pretty hard by an Azure deployment than ended up costing TONS more than anticipated. Even after we made it clear it would be a lot of OpEx. "Sales engineers gonna play games" -- and they did. New gig is just going down that path, and is, go figure, seeing the same problems. Burned by Azure, and now getting bilked for every last dollar by GCP.
  - izacus 4y ago
    Also don't underestimate the resistance of employees who built their careers only ever knowing how to do cloud - they'll make sure the cost reports and plans are always doctored in a way that cloud wins because that's the only way they know how to do their job.
    - red-iron-pine 4y ago
      > Also don't underestimate the resistance of employees who built their careers only ever knowing how to do cloud - they'll make sure the cost reports and plans are always doctored in a way that cloud wins because that's the only way they know how to do their job. Seconded. We called in Accenture to tell us if we should do the cloud. They said Yes. I was on the Solutions & Architecture team, and we asked to take a look at their numbers. Found multiple errors in their spreadsheets. Math being straight up incorrect, or calling out pricing that didn't match what our SaaS sales guys gave us. "Oh they're old reports". Okay fine, run them again with the new numbers, and slap the recent graduate who you forced to make this excel. Again, the numbers came back strongly in favor of Azure. Took a look again, this time had some fruity macro and pivot table, and we couldn't clearly make out what they did to get their final $$$ figures. 3 months later we declared we were "cloud first". There was much speculation as to how much $$$ the directors and VPs got. In a different life I was in sales engineering and there was an unspoken rule about "referral agent fees" to 3rd parties who help us close deals...
      - jbverschoor 4y ago
- hinkley 4y ago
  It's often been the case that the late adopters of the Adoption Cycle show up after the early adopters have moved onto the next adoption cycle. With computers it's also usually the case that the Late Adopters show up in the middle of the Trough of Disillusionment of the Hype Cycle. It takes a long time for new trends to percolate through the management class. I had a gruff old engineer at an early job who used to joke that one of the executives must have gone in for a dentist appointment and read the 5 year old tech magazines in the waiting room, because we have a new initiative to start doing something that other people are already stopping.
- andrewstuart 4y ago
  Here is the truly mind blowing map of how you are charged on AWS: https://d2908q01vomqb2.cloudfront.net/77de68daecd823babbb58edb1c8e14d7106e83bb/2022/03/11/Sourced-Data-Transfer-1.1-1.png https://d2908q01vomqb2.cloudfront.net/77de68daecd823babbb58e...
adventured 4y ago
This isn't remotely close to being accurate (backlash!). There is at least another 10-20 years of further, significant growth left in business cloud services before any meaningful turn back is/might going to occur. I have no personal stake in either direction, however when something is expanding the way cloud services continue to, and then to pretend there's a backlash occurring, it's quite silly. Some use cases don't make sense, some expenditures don't make sense, some data privacy risks don't make sense - that's not the beginning of a backlash, that's just standard business assessment. We've hardly even begun the meaningfully productive AI side of cloud services for business, and that's going to be gigantic. TechCrunch is doing the equivalent of declaring the backlash against the Internet has begun, circa 2001.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Yeah. There's some repatriation (including switching to colo and hosting providers) for reasons both good and bad. But backlash seems way overstated.
- logifail 4y ago
  > that's just standard business assessment Maybe it's time businesses actually did some honest assessment on cloud providers and their services? So many managers appear to think the cloud is powered by magic pixie dust.
debacle 4y ago
A lot of companies don't know how to do on prem anymore or never did.
- chucky_z 4y ago
  This is a real truth I've come to learn. I've worked in NOCs and the number of people on the planet who can successfully run on-premise hardware is... low. Not to take a negative view, it's just an unsexy skillset and doesn't attract a lot of talent and attention. Trying to hire for folks who can gracefully manage on-premise networks, power, and hardware is possible and extremely challenging. "Cloud," as it is today, is here to stay.
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 4y ago
    If nothing else, it seems a lot more stressful to be “the guy” when the storage/network/other catches fire and you are the one to deal with the mess. People already expect software to fail all the time, and there are reasonable ways to rollback in an emergency. People are far less tolerant for infrastructure failures.
  - b112 4y ago
    I recently noticed a job posted, for cloud and on prem. Likely, the goal being high compute/large datasets on site, cloud otherwise. The primary focus of this purely infrastructure position, is a coding take home. Now, infra as code is part of local cloud, but there is sooooo much more to handle. But because they have no idea how to handle infra, they seem stuck thinking it's just a dev job. Even while they hire stating it is not. Quite sad. So much knowledge lost, that they don't even know what to look, what to hire for.
    - ikiris 4y ago
      If you don't see the need for the ability to program in a cloud infra job, you aren't building them very big at all.
      - 4y ago
desireco42 4y ago
DHH founder of Basecamp was always skeptical about cloud. He recently published how much they saved moving away from the "cloud" AWS specifically. https://world.hey.com/dhh/why-we-re-leaving-the-cloud-654b47e0 https://world.hey.com/dhh/why-we-re-leaving-the-cloud-654b47...
- davesque 4y ago
  Honestly, DHH and Basecamp have both struck me as being kind of old news for a while now. And he's the only other person I've heard making noises about the cloud like it's a bad thing.
  - toomuchtodo 4y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35108813 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35108813 is another recent data point
- ghaff 4y ago
  Yeah but that's such an atypical example. Small company with, I assume, a pretty high-end skillset overall.
- tagyro 4y ago
  This! Also, from experience, going with a "smaller" cloud provider and opting for a dedicated machine can already reduce the bill by a huge amount. The position of power of the big 3 - AWS, GCP and Azure* - gives them almost 66% of the market - that doesn't seem right.
  - bshipp 4y ago
    I'm no expert, but I'm amazed how much server you can get for little money from a discount provider like Hetzner vs AWS. There's a large gulf between fully on-prem and using Azure/AWS that doesn't have the same personnel requirements. If business apps can be self-hosted on a dedicated box that's maintained by someone else, it's potentially a huge savings. At least, that's been my experience.
davesque 4y ago
Paywalled so couldn't read. Does this article mention who is doing this or give any numbers? I'm at a large, top 10 software vendor and this is not what I'm seeing at all.
iLoveOncall 4y ago
This is wishful thinking fueled by a few HN articles that made it on the front page.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
andrewstuart 4y ago
The (wrong) conventional wisdom is that cloud is easy, simple, cheap and requires no investment in complex systems management. This is what your CTO likely believes. In fact cloud is often complex, requires lots of highly specialsed systems management, is under powered and very expensive. 9 cents per gigabyte out if you’re lucky - that’s a startling price. Machines are old and out of date and left behind. Vendor lock-in is a real problem .. you probably can’t exit even if you want to. And worse, clouds often don’t even have the computing resources you need with “requesting quota” and waiting for your “quota” to be granted some time in the next 24 hours, the opposite of elastic and scalable. And if you need GPUs then the news for you is that gamers have vastly more powerful GPUs at vastly lower cost (even with Nvidia and AMD fleecing consumers on their next generation cards). Rent a bare metal server from a second or third tier player. Or buy a couple of fast fiber connections and buy some 16/32 core machines with 128 gig Ram. And honestly it’s not hard to run modern Linux machines, that’s an old crones tale.
- nimbius 4y ago
  requesting quota: poking the SRE or sysadmin to troll up and down the aisles of the colo datacenter sometime this week to find a QEMU hypervisor thats underprovisioned to the tune of $cores/$ram you want.
  - andrewstuart 4y ago
    On AWS the default quota for GPU instances is ZERO. Recently I had to do some performance testing. In the past I would have quickly started 5 or 6 instances of different types, run my performance tests, shut them down and be done within 2 hours. Since AWS introduced zero quota GPU instances, I had to request quota for one specific GPU instance type in one region and then waited 24 hours till it was “approved”. At that point I completely gave up on AWS as being a viable part of any GPU architecture. It gets no less scalable or elastic than that. I literally could have gone to the shop and bought a fleet of machines and built them at home in the time it took AWS to approve a quota of one GPU instance in one region.
    - 4y ago
tagyro 4y ago
On the other hand, "smart" companies move their on-prem to cloud :face_palm: https://www.db.com/news/detail/20201204-deutsche-bank-and-google-cloud-sign-pioneering-cloud-and-innovation-partnership?language_id=1 https://www.db.com/news/detail/20201204-deutsche-bank-and-go...
faeriechangling 4y ago
Both cloud and traditional datacenters have been growing for the last few decades. These "Cloud DESTROYS on-prem" and "on-prem DESTROYS cloud" articles are tiresome. Companies will do whatever saves them the most money.
- baq 4y ago
  > Companies will do whatever saves them the most money. The problem is companies doing one thing have no idea how expensive is doing that other thing... grass is always greener on the other side.
qwertyuiop_ 4y ago
Techcrunch is Tigerbeat of our times. Make news when there is no news.
flanked-evergl 4y ago
I feel like the cloud backlash has been begun-ing since I heard of cloud, just like the container backlash has been begun-ing since containers became popular, I also fondly remember the systemd backlash, that was awesome. Personally, I'm still waiting for the object-oriented backlash that started begun-ing before the others to finish begun-ing.
- thefourthchime 4y ago
  > object-oriented backlash I'm not really "out there" and "with it", but it seems the move has been away from classic OOP for a long time now. I never see new projects try to have the inheritance tree's that C# or Java have. I think small simple objects can be fine. It's when you get into metaprogramming with templates and multiple inheritance in C++ that I want to just run away.
  - bcrosby95 4y ago
    I call that "90s era oop", probably because I got into programming in the 90s and quickly learned that it's considered bad. So from my view this "move away from classic OOP" has been occurring for my whole professional career (20 years now) and I think it's probably more a matter of individual ignorance (mine included - hence '90s era) rather than an actually changing state of the field.
- aftergibson 4y ago
  Agreed, nothing to see here. I’d be happy to see more on-prem but my suspicion is companies are looking to cost-optimise their cloud infrastructure or negotiate better contracts, rather than a serious amount of industry movement to on-prem.
alanfranz 4y ago
Good luck moving back to full on-premises. I think that in the last 10 years some people forgot how many problems you can have when you self manage a dc, or when you just “rent a couple of servers from somebody”. Sure, hybrid approaches do work; keep your main infra in the cloud and supplement it with some cattle rented servers (that can fail with no prod impact) to handle predictable workloads. But think it very thoroughly before getting fully back to “on my premises”. You’ll discover a world that you never knew it existed.
- status200 4y ago
  That's a good point, also unless they set up a hypervisor like proxmox, the cloud probably has their technicians used to just vaporizing problematic VMs and clusters, and easily extending and deploying new machines, which is so much more time consuming in the physical computing space.
jdlyga 4y ago
Sometimes a cron job on an ec2 or server is all you need. Not everything needs to be so complicated.
- coredog64 4y ago
  EventBridge is probably a better option than cron. Unless you’re doing something crazy, you’ll be in the free tier. And if you need some compute, Lambda is right there (probably also in the free tier). Just keep an eye on CWL retention.
- rejectfinite 4y ago
  If you just need EC2 then something like Hertzner/Linode/Digital ocean or Colo DC seems way cheaper?
Aqueous 4y ago
Love the idea that a bunch of managers who failed to control their cloud spend are now blaming the cloud for their failure to control costs. The problem isn't the cloud it's that they are just wantonly spending money without the proper controls / cost containment. In 5 years once they've figured out to do that properly they'll be migrating stuff back to the cloud, because all they are doing by migrating out of the cloud is converting the cloud spend costs into paying for more personnel to manage or develop features they would otherwise get for free in the cloud.
- Spooky23 4y ago
  Cloud is a no brainer when you’re in growth mode. In that scenario, you’re always wasting incremental money in capacity by swinging from feast to famine. For the parts of your business that are steady state, cloud can be dumb, if you care about spend. At any significant scale you can trade flexibility for control and reduce cost. The other benefit is capex vs opex and how that affects your taxes - cloud makes it easier to shift to a pure opex model, but it’s not an exclusive ability. It depends on you however. It’s almost always a good deal to buy Office 365 or Google. If you have a heavy cyclical business, it’s probably smart to rent vs buy compute. Pay AWS October-December and turn everything off in January. At the end of the day, any CTO who has religious beliefs about this stuff is an idiot. Execution and cash drive these decisions.
  - hinkley 4y ago
    Moving applications on-prem kills its 'steady-state' status during the transition. Plus there's some 8 fallacies going on here. The Cloud Providers generally make it very expensive to have some of your stuff in the Cloud and some on-prem. That's a challenge for most businesses, which I typically assert should be about 80% boring and 20% volatile/dynamic/interesting/on fire, because that 20% can soak up a lot of fees on chatter between the two classes. That's by design. They want you all in or all out. They don't want you going back and forth. Whatever that was originally informed by (eg, the costs of their wires into and out of the Internet), that's where we are now and it seems to be considered a Good Idea. If they change that they might keep some customers, but they'll also give others an easier exit strategy.
ajessup 4y ago
While there are plenty of folks who have reason to push a repatriation narrative, and there will always be examples (Dropbox!), I'll believe it's real when cloud providers like AWS and Google start eating into their considerable margin and begin meaningfully dropping prices again.
paxys 4y ago
Hybrid was always going to be the end state of the cloud computing model. And it's not like the large cloud providers are being cut out in any way, like the title implies. They themselves all offer first class on-premises deployment and connectivity support as part of their offerings.
billsmithaustin 4y ago
Anyone have a non-paywall version?
imhoguy 4y ago
I think some mix two on-prem concepts here: 1) true on-prem DC which means HW, HVAC, UPS etc on premises with full HW staff and full network vs 2) old days bare metal which means colocation or stock rack offering in provider's DC, who takes care of all HW stuff under contract. I am participating in K8s migration to on-prem HW in customer's owned server room. The scaling flexibility is close to none. Old time HW procurement processes take months. Blades need to go thru HW and NW Engineer's hands for a few weeks, before even K8s workers can be installed there, then apps scaled. This is for a project which has known requirements and performance expectations. Forget any of that if you are just privoting start-up. But for anyone who just wants to "own" the data, the stack and to squeeze the maximum performance, then bare metal dedicated hosting or rack rental should be enough.
- vidarh 4y ago
  Agree with this. I would not want "true on prem" most places, not least because on-prem cost is driven in no small part by real-estate and electricity prices and salary costs near the colo, and for a lot of companies that means their on-prem won't be able to compete on price with colo or even managed servers with a provider. A lot of manage server offerings also offer requisitioning via API, rent on short term contracts (so still opex like cloud instead of capex). But I also tend to favour hybrid setups these days, and most managed providers also has a cloud offering, which gets you the best of both if you have a decent provisioning setup and an overlay network: The base load on managed servers at whatever commitment period gives you the best prices. The cloud instances provides elasticity. Done well your users/devs can't tell where one ends and the other starts. And because you have a cloud setup tied in, you can go pretty close to the wire on those managed servers - a lot more so than with a purely on-prem/purely colo/rented servers setup, increasing the savings from the managed servers even more. I've had setups like this where we hardly ever needed to spin up any elastic capacity, but where having the capability meant the managed servers often got to 90%+ utilisation because we could let the utilisation rate get that high without issue knowing the system would spin up cloud instances if necessary.
bob1029 4y ago
Cloud is really good at what it does. There are definitely some business models it simply cannot accommodate, but I think these are in the minority now. I used to be super-against cloud until I became the backstop for our entire IT infrastructure. It's really funny what happens to your beliefs when you take on ownership of more problems. Complaining about how Azure is 20ms slower than it needs to be on some storage service is nice, but are you prepared to personally take total ownership for that service's health by bringing it on-prem? Talking about how we could do it cheaper & faster in our house is super easy. Actually executing is a completely different story. I won't even move back to on-prem Active Directory at this point. The convenience of having this managed centrally is unbelievable compared to where we were at a decade ago. Today, an employee can go to Best Buy, grab a completely new machine, connect it to our directory using the retail OOBE and start working productively within 20 minutes. Not one time does the employee need to bother an IT person during this process. Could you achieve the same with an on-prem setup? Absolutely. Would it take more money and time than we have available? Probably. There are risks with going all-in on cloud, but I assert that those risks are almost always less severe than the risks endured with on-prem. When is the last time a cloud vendor made some last-minute change to a product or service that endangered their customer base? You typically have years to migrate off something a cloud vendor doesn't want to support anymore, simply because they have to make sure 10k other customers don't balk too. This is also why these products are so stable in terms of roadmap. Going with the herd is a proven way to protect yourself. Being the one shop still online when 99% of the clouds go down is probably not a realistic competitive advantage for your business. I would conclude by saying that you should minimize the diversity of cloud products as much as is reasonable for your operations. Keeping AWS to just EC2, EBS, Route53, etc., ensures that any need to migrate to a different cloud provider is actually tenable. Put the intelligence into your application/product, not the plumbing around it.
- LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
  > Being the one shop still online when 99% of the clouds go down is probably not a realistic competitive advantage for your business. It depends. If you're just another Etsy store, or a SaaS that integrates with other SaaSes, then yes. The entire internet will be down if AWS is down and nobody will blame you. But if your customers are using your app on a job site and they can't work without it, you'll lose everyone if you have a single outage of even a few minutes. I have a client in this space and they've handled this by making the app work offline and by pushing a few high-value things outside of AWS to survive an outage of their main stack, such as access grants, and the app can start to use MMS to send its data by including a token with the photo and job info and then this gets synced later by actually adding the token receiver to a user list as if you'd added them through the main UI.
FlyingSnake 4y ago
What a weak article, where is the data that supports their arguments? At this point tech press has become a parody and just spews out speculations. Speaking as someone involved in cost reductions in cloud services, there’s definitely a push towards taming the large bills. However hardly anyone is planning to move for EKS/RDS/GKE to self hosted OpenShift/OKD clusters.
pmayrgundter 4y ago
I wouldn't say begun.. this is an old pendulum in computing, tho maybe we're on yet another cycle? I wrote a "Mist Computing" manifesto in 2015 while working at Google, capturing similar concerns at that time: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SYiDABLgOMljsWl2SDrz5jRLFrMz2M0WeFAHxHRXYSQ/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SYiDABLgOMljsWl2SDrz5jRL...
fidrelity 4y ago
"You’re crazy if you don’t start in the cloud; you’re crazy if you stay on it."[0] What were seeing is that some cloud native companies have reached a size and maturity where the on-premises move makes sense. That's all, no fundamental shift. [0]: https://a16z.com/2021/05/27/cost-of-cloud-paradox-market-cap-cloud-lifecycle-scale-growth-repatriation-optimization/ https://a16z.com/2021/05/27/cost-of-cloud-paradox-market-cap...
SteveNuts 4y ago
Our biggest issue is just cost for bandwidth out. I assume this is their way to keep you within their own ecosystem.
tkiolp4 4y ago
I don’t think only cloud is the problem (if any). What I see in every company I join is a huge list of saas they depend on: - lokalise - newrelic/datadog - opsgenie - gitlab/github - slack - atlassian suite - google/microsoft suite - HR (e.g., personio) - miro - and a large etc. These saas charge per month per user. As soon as your company has a couple hundred employees that require such platforms, we are not talking pennies anymore.
- monkaiju 4y ago
  Couldn't agree more. Also hosting alternatives to many of these, like Mattermost over Slack, is not difficult and is usually more performant.
- sharemywin 4y ago
  I can see that being an issue.
- simonbarker87 4y ago
  Sure but building and maintaining those types of tolls internally probably costs more than paying those companies to provide it for you. Paying for a host of proprietary cloud products from AWS of the like vs cloud VMs isn’t the same comparison.
  - tkiolp4 4y ago
    Well, it’s not that such platforms are always needed, though. For instance you may rely on confluence so that managers can write and share documents… well, why not let them write and share documents via github/gitlab (assuming your company is already using these platforms)? Common answer is: managers don’t know how to use github/gitlab. But that’s a sad scenario. Perhaps the company should hire managers who know how to use (or are willing to learn!) github/gitlab? I bet such managers end up being better than the regular ones.
- mywittyname 4y ago
  My company (sub-1000 heads) is undertaking a project to seriously evaluate costs of all these services. Because you're right, there's a 10x-my-salary annual cost savings to be had after just a rudimentary analysis of unused tool license costs. We are lucky that we auto-provisions tool access, and use Okta, which makes analyzing and acting on this data pretty trivial. I think a lot of these SaaS companies are feeling the squeeze and pressure to be profitable. A few that we've been customers of since they were wee companies are jacking up rates by 3-5x. The value of an $8k product has a lot lower expectations than a $40k one.
xwdv 4y ago
Once a company moves off the cloud, it’s a sign they are done growing. They are now at a plateau where they are pinching pennies trying to keep costs as low as possible because revenue isn’t growing like it used to and they no longer have a need to rapidly add compute resources. Growing companies that go off cloud prematurely will quickly relearn the forgotten lessons of why the cloud was built in the first place.
simonbarker87 4y ago
A huge amount of money has been made moving companies to Cloud over the past decade. A huge amount of money is going to be made moving many of those companies back over the coming decade. That being said I think what we will see is a move from propriety tools and products to essentially cloud VMs. No one really wants to run their own hardware but likewise no one wants to pay for SQS, DynamoDB, SES, API Gateway etc (insert your preferred cloud provider’s proprietary product)
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
octacat 4y ago
From when has HN became a paywall article aggregator?
- dang 4y ago
  If there's a workaround, it's ok. Users usually post workarounds in the thread. If there's not a workaround, it's not ok. This has been the case since 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989 and is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. As the current submission appears not to have a workaround, I've downweighted it.
manv1 4y ago
Maybe the problem is that staff wants to learn cloud because they don't want to be left behind in the job market. So everyone pushes for cloud, even though it really won't be a benefit to the business itself. I mean, what kind of CTO would you be if you didn't have a cloud project going on? Who would hire you if you got booted?
- kevviiinn 4y ago
  >Who would hire you Someone who isn't an idiot that jumps on every bandwagon they see?
  - manv1 4y ago
    If you're a cloud denier it's better to have tried and failed ("it didn't work because it costs too much") than to have never tried at all ("The cloud...it sucks.")
    - kevviiinn 4y ago
      Or I can easily look at the situation and see that it costs way more than just hosting on prem, you don't have to actually try something to estimate costs
aborsy 4y ago
I have a question for those familiar with cloud storage. Even I, as an ordinary user, won’t put my data without strong client side encryption in the cloud (even then there is a risk). How come major international (say, European) companies store their data in servers of the American countries? What prevents US intelligence agencies and even corporate from snooping into valuable business data in order to stay ahead? It’s like I back up my data to my competitor’s computer. I think there was a decade where the situation was not as clear as it’s now, and cloud companies could collect a lot of data. I don’t think it’s that easy anymore, with the spread of client side encryption and so on (although e2ee has limitations too).
- deanCommie 4y ago
  The same way as you. Most of these services support client-side encryption or server-side encryption with customer-managed keys with services like KMS: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/kms/latest/developerguide/concepts.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/kms/latest/developerguide/concep... Now if you want to get your tinfoil hat on and say "If it's server-side, then what's stopping Amazon from just lying", the answer is independent auditors. You might not be able to get a tour of the inner workings of these services, but multi-billion dollar customers absolutely ask for it and get it under NDA's.
  - aborsy 4y ago
    You are right. I use KMS sometimes, but that’s server side encryption. KMS protects a master key. It doesn’t protect data encryption keys encrypted with that master key. Those keys are exposed outside HSMs, in places like S3 in RAM or sometimes disks. Further, the encryption and decryption of data are done outside HSM. So, I know my disk encrypted with KMS is not protected from AWS. But I guess the audits help here. Also, client side encryption works for things like backups. End to end encryption rules out a lot of features. Therefore lot of companies store data in plaintext (data base, web servers, user facing services etc).
unstatusthequo 4y ago
I de-clouded 40TB this past year, so it is a thing. I think for cloud it became too easy to just spin things up and never delete.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
lamontcg 4y ago
"Death of Cloud predicted, film at 11"

185 points by taubek 4y ago

That's great. Wait until they see the lead times for getting new infrastructure. And you need to rack and stack those servers somewhere. And you need to ensure that data is backed-up. And you need to ensure you have a DR environment setup so if your primary location is taken out by a local weather calamity you're not SOL for days/weeks/months. And you need the staff to manage and take care of all these things. And don't forget patching. You have to keep everything patched and up-to-date. And don't forget coverage. People have this thing about taking vacations. Also, setting big data compute infrastructure is a bit different than traditional server infrastructure, if one has never done it before. Your compute, storage, and network infrastructure are critical components and need to be designed and tuned together. I know. We did it. And now some 7 years later we've moved it all to the cloud.

imwillofficial 4y ago

Yeah, this so called backlash is a fantasy.

ary 4y ago

This is not what we're seeing (disclosure, I'm a founder at a cloud-cost management startup). Momentum is still towards the cloud, with some exceptions, given the amount of talent available to deploy there versus on-prem. The "move" to on-prem is like the "move" to alternate or hybrid clouds: it's a negotiation tactic with AWS et al. When it's time to negotiate your enterprise discount program, savings plan(s), etc., etc. you need leverage, and that's what this is. Some companies spend multiple hundreds of millions of dollars with AWS alone and at that cost any and every tactic to bring down spend will get deployed.

jamesblonde 4y ago
That's your experience. We had a global network operator talk to us about repatriating its ML workloads on-premises from Azure. Cost is the main factor, sure.
- gumby 4y ago
  Azure has an on prem version to facilitate (and monetize) that transition. I don’t like Azure and won’t use them again but this seems like a smart approach for MS to take.
bklyn11201 4y ago
Even with the discounts, savings plans, multi-year commit discounts, etc., the cloud costs are absolutely absurd if you are running stable applications where you understand the future growth, use, and demand. Yes, the cloud is the right place for 99% of apps out there, but the market is sending a clear objective out to all tech companies: become profitable and build a sustainable, high margin on your products. Every maturing company with predictable products must be exploring ways to move workloads out of the cloud. AWS took your margin and isn't giving it back. https://a16z.com/2021/05/27/cost-of-cloud-paradox-market-cap-cloud-lifecycle-scale-growth-repatriation-optimization/ https://a16z.com/2021/05/27/cost-of-cloud-paradox-market-cap...
- wmfiv 4y ago
  Dropbox (from the a16z article) to me is the exception that proves the point. What percentage of COGS is your cloud/infstracture spend? If your products don't look like cloud infrastructure (aka Dropbox), it better be very small. If you think cloud is costing you 1000% what it would cost on-premise, that's almost certainly a spend and architectural discipline problem, not a cloud problem.
  - marcosdumay 4y ago
    Hum... A 1000% overhead looks typical to me. Whether that's an important saving or not changes from business to business, but anything less than 1000% seems only achievable by customized discounts from the cloud provider.
    - throwaway894345 4y ago
      I feel like this is comparing some cost-optimized on-prem scenario with a "idgaf, I'm prioritizing growth over cost savings" cloud scenario. Every company I've worked at has been way more concerned with growth to the point that the cloud spend is wildly careless, but we could easily reduce it by a factor of 10 with dramatically less effort than it would take to move on prem.
      - deleted 4y ago
unity1001 4y ago
> (disclosure, I'm a founder at a cloud-cost management startup) Isnt it natural that your service gains more users at this time when everyone is trying to cut down on cloud costs... Cloud usage may be declining, but those who are still using it would want to cut costs...
red-iron-pine 4y ago
There is still a lot of momentum because the 2nd and 3rd wave have yet to be burned. Pre-COVID I was a at a F500 that had gotten screwed pretty hard by an Azure deployment than ended up costing TONS more than anticipated. Even after we made it clear it would be a lot of OpEx. "Sales engineers gonna play games" -- and they did. New gig is just going down that path, and is, go figure, seeing the same problems. Burned by Azure, and now getting bilked for every last dollar by GCP.
- izacus 4y ago
  Also don't underestimate the resistance of employees who built their careers only ever knowing how to do cloud - they'll make sure the cost reports and plans are always doctored in a way that cloud wins because that's the only way they know how to do their job.
  - red-iron-pine 4y ago
    > Also don't underestimate the resistance of employees who built their careers only ever knowing how to do cloud - they'll make sure the cost reports and plans are always doctored in a way that cloud wins because that's the only way they know how to do their job. Seconded. We called in Accenture to tell us if we should do the cloud. They said Yes. I was on the Solutions & Architecture team, and we asked to take a look at their numbers. Found multiple errors in their spreadsheets. Math being straight up incorrect, or calling out pricing that didn't match what our SaaS sales guys gave us. "Oh they're old reports". Okay fine, run them again with the new numbers, and slap the recent graduate who you forced to make this excel. Again, the numbers came back strongly in favor of Azure. Took a look again, this time had some fruity macro and pivot table, and we couldn't clearly make out what they did to get their final $$$ figures. 3 months later we declared we were "cloud first". There was much speculation as to how much $$$ the directors and VPs got. In a different life I was in sales engineering and there was an unspoken rule about "referral agent fees" to 3rd parties who help us close deals...
    - jbverschoor 4y ago
hinkley 4y ago
It's often been the case that the late adopters of the Adoption Cycle show up after the early adopters have moved onto the next adoption cycle. With computers it's also usually the case that the Late Adopters show up in the middle of the Trough of Disillusionment of the Hype Cycle. It takes a long time for new trends to percolate through the management class. I had a gruff old engineer at an early job who used to joke that one of the executives must have gone in for a dentist appointment and read the 5 year old tech magazines in the waiting room, because we have a new initiative to start doing something that other people are already stopping.
andrewstuart 4y ago
Here is the truly mind blowing map of how you are charged on AWS: https://d2908q01vomqb2.cloudfront.net/77de68daecd823babbb58edb1c8e14d7106e83bb/2022/03/11/Sourced-Data-Transfer-1.1-1.png https://d2908q01vomqb2.cloudfront.net/77de68daecd823babbb58e...

adventured 4y ago

This isn't remotely close to being accurate (backlash!). There is at least another 10-20 years of further, significant growth left in business cloud services before any meaningful turn back is/might going to occur. I have no personal stake in either direction, however when something is expanding the way cloud services continue to, and then to pretend there's a backlash occurring, it's quite silly. Some use cases don't make sense, some expenditures don't make sense, some data privacy risks don't make sense - that's not the beginning of a backlash, that's just standard business assessment. We've hardly even begun the meaningfully productive AI side of cloud services for business, and that's going to be gigantic. TechCrunch is doing the equivalent of declaring the backlash against the Internet has begun, circa 2001.

ghaff 4y ago
Yeah. There's some repatriation (including switching to colo and hosting providers) for reasons both good and bad. But backlash seems way overstated.
logifail 4y ago
> that's just standard business assessment Maybe it's time businesses actually did some honest assessment on cloud providers and their services? So many managers appear to think the cloud is powered by magic pixie dust.

debacle 4y ago

A lot of companies don't know how to do on prem anymore or never did.

chucky_z 4y ago
This is a real truth I've come to learn. I've worked in NOCs and the number of people on the planet who can successfully run on-premise hardware is... low. Not to take a negative view, it's just an unsexy skillset and doesn't attract a lot of talent and attention. Trying to hire for folks who can gracefully manage on-premise networks, power, and hardware is possible and extremely challenging. "Cloud," as it is today, is here to stay.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 4y ago
  If nothing else, it seems a lot more stressful to be “the guy” when the storage/network/other catches fire and you are the one to deal with the mess. People already expect software to fail all the time, and there are reasonable ways to rollback in an emergency. People are far less tolerant for infrastructure failures.
- b112 4y ago
  I recently noticed a job posted, for cloud and on prem. Likely, the goal being high compute/large datasets on site, cloud otherwise. The primary focus of this purely infrastructure position, is a coding take home. Now, infra as code is part of local cloud, but there is sooooo much more to handle. But because they have no idea how to handle infra, they seem stuck thinking it's just a dev job. Even while they hire stating it is not. Quite sad. So much knowledge lost, that they don't even know what to look, what to hire for.
  - ikiris 4y ago
    If you don't see the need for the ability to program in a cloud infra job, you aren't building them very big at all.
    - 4y ago

desireco42 4y ago

DHH founder of Basecamp was always skeptical about cloud. He recently published how much they saved moving away from the "cloud" AWS specifically. https://world.hey.com/dhh/why-we-re-leaving-the-cloud-654b47e0 https://world.hey.com/dhh/why-we-re-leaving-the-cloud-654b47...

davesque 4y ago
Honestly, DHH and Basecamp have both struck me as being kind of old news for a while now. And he's the only other person I've heard making noises about the cloud like it's a bad thing.
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35108813 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35108813 is another recent data point
ghaff 4y ago
Yeah but that's such an atypical example. Small company with, I assume, a pretty high-end skillset overall.
tagyro 4y ago
This! Also, from experience, going with a "smaller" cloud provider and opting for a dedicated machine can already reduce the bill by a huge amount. The position of power of the big 3 - AWS, GCP and Azure* - gives them almost 66% of the market - that doesn't seem right.
- bshipp 4y ago
  I'm no expert, but I'm amazed how much server you can get for little money from a discount provider like Hetzner vs AWS. There's a large gulf between fully on-prem and using Azure/AWS that doesn't have the same personnel requirements. If business apps can be self-hosted on a dedicated box that's maintained by someone else, it's potentially a huge savings. At least, that's been my experience.

davesque 4y ago

Paywalled so couldn't read. Does this article mention who is doing this or give any numbers? I'm at a large, top 10 software vendor and this is not what I'm seeing at all.

iLoveOncall 4y ago

This is wishful thinking fueled by a few HN articles that made it on the front page.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

andrewstuart 4y ago

The (wrong) conventional wisdom is that cloud is easy, simple, cheap and requires no investment in complex systems management. This is what your CTO likely believes. In fact cloud is often complex, requires lots of highly specialsed systems management, is under powered and very expensive. 9 cents per gigabyte out if you’re lucky - that’s a startling price. Machines are old and out of date and left behind. Vendor lock-in is a real problem .. you probably can’t exit even if you want to. And worse, clouds often don’t even have the computing resources you need with “requesting quota” and waiting for your “quota” to be granted some time in the next 24 hours, the opposite of elastic and scalable. And if you need GPUs then the news for you is that gamers have vastly more powerful GPUs at vastly lower cost (even with Nvidia and AMD fleecing consumers on their next generation cards). Rent a bare metal server from a second or third tier player. Or buy a couple of fast fiber connections and buy some 16/32 core machines with 128 gig Ram. And honestly it’s not hard to run modern Linux machines, that’s an old crones tale.

nimbius 4y ago
requesting quota: poking the SRE or sysadmin to troll up and down the aisles of the colo datacenter sometime this week to find a QEMU hypervisor thats underprovisioned to the tune of $cores/$ram you want.
- andrewstuart 4y ago
  On AWS the default quota for GPU instances is ZERO. Recently I had to do some performance testing. In the past I would have quickly started 5 or 6 instances of different types, run my performance tests, shut them down and be done within 2 hours. Since AWS introduced zero quota GPU instances, I had to request quota for one specific GPU instance type in one region and then waited 24 hours till it was “approved”. At that point I completely gave up on AWS as being a viable part of any GPU architecture. It gets no less scalable or elastic than that. I literally could have gone to the shop and bought a fleet of machines and built them at home in the time it took AWS to approve a quota of one GPU instance in one region.
  - 4y ago

tagyro 4y ago

On the other hand, "smart" companies move their on-prem to cloud :face_palm: https://www.db.com/news/detail/20201204-deutsche-bank-and-google-cloud-sign-pioneering-cloud-and-innovation-partnership?language_id=1 https://www.db.com/news/detail/20201204-deutsche-bank-and-go...

faeriechangling 4y ago

Both cloud and traditional datacenters have been growing for the last few decades. These "Cloud DESTROYS on-prem" and "on-prem DESTROYS cloud" articles are tiresome. Companies will do whatever saves them the most money.

baq 4y ago
> Companies will do whatever saves them the most money. The problem is companies doing one thing have no idea how expensive is doing that other thing... grass is always greener on the other side.

qwertyuiop_ 4y ago

Techcrunch is Tigerbeat of our times. Make news when there is no news.

flanked-evergl 4y ago

I feel like the cloud backlash has been begun-ing since I heard of cloud, just like the container backlash has been begun-ing since containers became popular, I also fondly remember the systemd backlash, that was awesome. Personally, I'm still waiting for the object-oriented backlash that started begun-ing before the others to finish begun-ing.

thefourthchime 4y ago
> object-oriented backlash I'm not really "out there" and "with it", but it seems the move has been away from classic OOP for a long time now. I never see new projects try to have the inheritance tree's that C# or Java have. I think small simple objects can be fine. It's when you get into metaprogramming with templates and multiple inheritance in C++ that I want to just run away.
- bcrosby95 4y ago
  I call that "90s era oop", probably because I got into programming in the 90s and quickly learned that it's considered bad. So from my view this "move away from classic OOP" has been occurring for my whole professional career (20 years now) and I think it's probably more a matter of individual ignorance (mine included - hence '90s era) rather than an actually changing state of the field.
aftergibson 4y ago
Agreed, nothing to see here. I’d be happy to see more on-prem but my suspicion is companies are looking to cost-optimise their cloud infrastructure or negotiate better contracts, rather than a serious amount of industry movement to on-prem.

alanfranz 4y ago

Good luck moving back to full on-premises. I think that in the last 10 years some people forgot how many problems you can have when you self manage a dc, or when you just “rent a couple of servers from somebody”. Sure, hybrid approaches do work; keep your main infra in the cloud and supplement it with some cattle rented servers (that can fail with no prod impact) to handle predictable workloads. But think it very thoroughly before getting fully back to “on my premises”. You’ll discover a world that you never knew it existed.

status200 4y ago
That's a good point, also unless they set up a hypervisor like proxmox, the cloud probably has their technicians used to just vaporizing problematic VMs and clusters, and easily extending and deploying new machines, which is so much more time consuming in the physical computing space.

jdlyga 4y ago

Sometimes a cron job on an ec2 or server is all you need. Not everything needs to be so complicated.

coredog64 4y ago
EventBridge is probably a better option than cron. Unless you’re doing something crazy, you’ll be in the free tier. And if you need some compute, Lambda is right there (probably also in the free tier). Just keep an eye on CWL retention.
rejectfinite 4y ago
If you just need EC2 then something like Hertzner/Linode/Digital ocean or Colo DC seems way cheaper?

Aqueous 4y ago

Love the idea that a bunch of managers who failed to control their cloud spend are now blaming the cloud for their failure to control costs. The problem isn't the cloud it's that they are just wantonly spending money without the proper controls / cost containment. In 5 years once they've figured out to do that properly they'll be migrating stuff back to the cloud, because all they are doing by migrating out of the cloud is converting the cloud spend costs into paying for more personnel to manage or develop features they would otherwise get for free in the cloud.

Spooky23 4y ago
Cloud is a no brainer when you’re in growth mode. In that scenario, you’re always wasting incremental money in capacity by swinging from feast to famine. For the parts of your business that are steady state, cloud can be dumb, if you care about spend. At any significant scale you can trade flexibility for control and reduce cost. The other benefit is capex vs opex and how that affects your taxes - cloud makes it easier to shift to a pure opex model, but it’s not an exclusive ability. It depends on you however. It’s almost always a good deal to buy Office 365 or Google. If you have a heavy cyclical business, it’s probably smart to rent vs buy compute. Pay AWS October-December and turn everything off in January. At the end of the day, any CTO who has religious beliefs about this stuff is an idiot. Execution and cash drive these decisions.
- hinkley 4y ago
  Moving applications on-prem kills its 'steady-state' status during the transition. Plus there's some 8 fallacies going on here. The Cloud Providers generally make it very expensive to have some of your stuff in the Cloud and some on-prem. That's a challenge for most businesses, which I typically assert should be about 80% boring and 20% volatile/dynamic/interesting/on fire, because that 20% can soak up a lot of fees on chatter between the two classes. That's by design. They want you all in or all out. They don't want you going back and forth. Whatever that was originally informed by (eg, the costs of their wires into and out of the Internet), that's where we are now and it seems to be considered a Good Idea. If they change that they might keep some customers, but they'll also give others an easier exit strategy.

ajessup 4y ago

While there are plenty of folks who have reason to push a repatriation narrative, and there will always be examples (Dropbox!), I'll believe it's real when cloud providers like AWS and Google start eating into their considerable margin and begin meaningfully dropping prices again.

paxys 4y ago

Hybrid was always going to be the end state of the cloud computing model. And it's not like the large cloud providers are being cut out in any way, like the title implies. They themselves all offer first class on-premises deployment and connectivity support as part of their offerings.

billsmithaustin 4y ago

Anyone have a non-paywall version?

imhoguy 4y ago

I think some mix two on-prem concepts here: 1) true on-prem DC which means HW, HVAC, UPS etc on premises with full HW staff and full network vs 2) old days bare metal which means colocation or stock rack offering in provider's DC, who takes care of all HW stuff under contract. I am participating in K8s migration to on-prem HW in customer's owned server room. The scaling flexibility is close to none. Old time HW procurement processes take months. Blades need to go thru HW and NW Engineer's hands for a few weeks, before even K8s workers can be installed there, then apps scaled. This is for a project which has known requirements and performance expectations. Forget any of that if you are just privoting start-up. But for anyone who just wants to "own" the data, the stack and to squeeze the maximum performance, then bare metal dedicated hosting or rack rental should be enough.

vidarh 4y ago
Agree with this. I would not want "true on prem" most places, not least because on-prem cost is driven in no small part by real-estate and electricity prices and salary costs near the colo, and for a lot of companies that means their on-prem won't be able to compete on price with colo or even managed servers with a provider. A lot of manage server offerings also offer requisitioning via API, rent on short term contracts (so still opex like cloud instead of capex). But I also tend to favour hybrid setups these days, and most managed providers also has a cloud offering, which gets you the best of both if you have a decent provisioning setup and an overlay network: The base load on managed servers at whatever commitment period gives you the best prices. The cloud instances provides elasticity. Done well your users/devs can't tell where one ends and the other starts. And because you have a cloud setup tied in, you can go pretty close to the wire on those managed servers - a lot more so than with a purely on-prem/purely colo/rented servers setup, increasing the savings from the managed servers even more. I've had setups like this where we hardly ever needed to spin up any elastic capacity, but where having the capability meant the managed servers often got to 90%+ utilisation because we could let the utilisation rate get that high without issue knowing the system would spin up cloud instances if necessary.

bob1029 4y ago

Cloud is really good at what it does. There are definitely some business models it simply cannot accommodate, but I think these are in the minority now. I used to be super-against cloud until I became the backstop for our entire IT infrastructure. It's really funny what happens to your beliefs when you take on ownership of more problems. Complaining about how Azure is 20ms slower than it needs to be on some storage service is nice, but are you prepared to personally take total ownership for that service's health by bringing it on-prem? Talking about how we could do it cheaper & faster in our house is super easy. Actually executing is a completely different story. I won't even move back to on-prem Active Directory at this point. The convenience of having this managed centrally is unbelievable compared to where we were at a decade ago. Today, an employee can go to Best Buy, grab a completely new machine, connect it to our directory using the retail OOBE and start working productively within 20 minutes. Not one time does the employee need to bother an IT person during this process. Could you achieve the same with an on-prem setup? Absolutely. Would it take more money and time than we have available? Probably. There are risks with going all-in on cloud, but I assert that those risks are almost always less severe than the risks endured with on-prem. When is the last time a cloud vendor made some last-minute change to a product or service that endangered their customer base? You typically have years to migrate off something a cloud vendor doesn't want to support anymore, simply because they have to make sure 10k other customers don't balk too. This is also why these products are so stable in terms of roadmap. Going with the herd is a proven way to protect yourself. Being the one shop still online when 99% of the clouds go down is probably not a realistic competitive advantage for your business. I would conclude by saying that you should minimize the diversity of cloud products as much as is reasonable for your operations. Keeping AWS to just EC2, EBS, Route53, etc., ensures that any need to migrate to a different cloud provider is actually tenable. Put the intelligence into your application/product, not the plumbing around it.

LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
> Being the one shop still online when 99% of the clouds go down is probably not a realistic competitive advantage for your business. It depends. If you're just another Etsy store, or a SaaS that integrates with other SaaSes, then yes. The entire internet will be down if AWS is down and nobody will blame you. But if your customers are using your app on a job site and they can't work without it, you'll lose everyone if you have a single outage of even a few minutes. I have a client in this space and they've handled this by making the app work offline and by pushing a few high-value things outside of AWS to survive an outage of their main stack, such as access grants, and the app can start to use MMS to send its data by including a token with the photo and job info and then this gets synced later by actually adding the token receiver to a user list as if you'd added them through the main UI.

FlyingSnake 4y ago

What a weak article, where is the data that supports their arguments? At this point tech press has become a parody and just spews out speculations. Speaking as someone involved in cost reductions in cloud services, there’s definitely a push towards taming the large bills. However hardly anyone is planning to move for EKS/RDS/GKE to self hosted OpenShift/OKD clusters.

pmayrgundter 4y ago

I wouldn't say begun.. this is an old pendulum in computing, tho maybe we're on yet another cycle? I wrote a "Mist Computing" manifesto in 2015 while working at Google, capturing similar concerns at that time: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SYiDABLgOMljsWl2SDrz5jRLFrMz2M0WeFAHxHRXYSQ/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SYiDABLgOMljsWl2SDrz5jRL...

fidrelity 4y ago

"You’re crazy if you don’t start in the cloud; you’re crazy if you stay on it."[0] What were seeing is that some cloud native companies have reached a size and maturity where the on-premises move makes sense. That's all, no fundamental shift. [0]: https://a16z.com/2021/05/27/cost-of-cloud-paradox-market-cap-cloud-lifecycle-scale-growth-repatriation-optimization/ https://a16z.com/2021/05/27/cost-of-cloud-paradox-market-cap...

SteveNuts 4y ago

Our biggest issue is just cost for bandwidth out. I assume this is their way to keep you within their own ecosystem.

tkiolp4 4y ago

I don’t think only cloud is the problem (if any). What I see in every company I join is a huge list of saas they depend on: - lokalise - newrelic/datadog - opsgenie - gitlab/github - slack - atlassian suite - google/microsoft suite - HR (e.g., personio) - miro - and a large etc. These saas charge per month per user. As soon as your company has a couple hundred employees that require such platforms, we are not talking pennies anymore.

monkaiju 4y ago
Couldn't agree more. Also hosting alternatives to many of these, like Mattermost over Slack, is not difficult and is usually more performant.
sharemywin 4y ago
I can see that being an issue.
simonbarker87 4y ago
Sure but building and maintaining those types of tolls internally probably costs more than paying those companies to provide it for you. Paying for a host of proprietary cloud products from AWS of the like vs cloud VMs isn’t the same comparison.
- tkiolp4 4y ago
  Well, it’s not that such platforms are always needed, though. For instance you may rely on confluence so that managers can write and share documents… well, why not let them write and share documents via github/gitlab (assuming your company is already using these platforms)? Common answer is: managers don’t know how to use github/gitlab. But that’s a sad scenario. Perhaps the company should hire managers who know how to use (or are willing to learn!) github/gitlab? I bet such managers end up being better than the regular ones.
mywittyname 4y ago
My company (sub-1000 heads) is undertaking a project to seriously evaluate costs of all these services. Because you're right, there's a 10x-my-salary annual cost savings to be had after just a rudimentary analysis of unused tool license costs. We are lucky that we auto-provisions tool access, and use Okta, which makes analyzing and acting on this data pretty trivial. I think a lot of these SaaS companies are feeling the squeeze and pressure to be profitable. A few that we've been customers of since they were wee companies are jacking up rates by 3-5x. The value of an $8k product has a lot lower expectations than a $40k one.

xwdv 4y ago

Once a company moves off the cloud, it’s a sign they are done growing. They are now at a plateau where they are pinching pennies trying to keep costs as low as possible because revenue isn’t growing like it used to and they no longer have a need to rapidly add compute resources. Growing companies that go off cloud prematurely will quickly relearn the forgotten lessons of why the cloud was built in the first place.

simonbarker87 4y ago

A huge amount of money has been made moving companies to Cloud over the past decade. A huge amount of money is going to be made moving many of those companies back over the coming decade. That being said I think what we will see is a move from propriety tools and products to essentially cloud VMs. No one really wants to run their own hardware but likewise no one wants to pay for SQS, DynamoDB, SES, API Gateway etc (insert your preferred cloud provider’s proprietary product)

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

octacat 4y ago

From when has HN became a paywall article aggregator?

dang 4y ago
If there's a workaround, it's ok. Users usually post workarounds in the thread. If there's not a workaround, it's not ok. This has been the case since 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989 and is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. As the current submission appears not to have a workaround, I've downweighted it.

manv1 4y ago

Maybe the problem is that staff wants to learn cloud because they don't want to be left behind in the job market. So everyone pushes for cloud, even though it really won't be a benefit to the business itself. I mean, what kind of CTO would you be if you didn't have a cloud project going on? Who would hire you if you got booted?

kevviiinn 4y ago
>Who would hire you Someone who isn't an idiot that jumps on every bandwagon they see?
- manv1 4y ago
  If you're a cloud denier it's better to have tried and failed ("it didn't work because it costs too much") than to have never tried at all ("The cloud...it sucks.")
  - kevviiinn 4y ago
    Or I can easily look at the situation and see that it costs way more than just hosting on prem, you don't have to actually try something to estimate costs

aborsy 4y ago

I have a question for those familiar with cloud storage. Even I, as an ordinary user, won’t put my data without strong client side encryption in the cloud (even then there is a risk). How come major international (say, European) companies store their data in servers of the American countries? What prevents US intelligence agencies and even corporate from snooping into valuable business data in order to stay ahead? It’s like I back up my data to my competitor’s computer. I think there was a decade where the situation was not as clear as it’s now, and cloud companies could collect a lot of data. I don’t think it’s that easy anymore, with the spread of client side encryption and so on (although e2ee has limitations too).

deanCommie 4y ago
The same way as you. Most of these services support client-side encryption or server-side encryption with customer-managed keys with services like KMS: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/kms/latest/developerguide/concepts.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/kms/latest/developerguide/concep... Now if you want to get your tinfoil hat on and say "If it's server-side, then what's stopping Amazon from just lying", the answer is independent auditors. You might not be able to get a tour of the inner workings of these services, but multi-billion dollar customers absolutely ask for it and get it under NDA's.
- aborsy 4y ago
  You are right. I use KMS sometimes, but that’s server side encryption. KMS protects a master key. It doesn’t protect data encryption keys encrypted with that master key. Those keys are exposed outside HSMs, in places like S3 in RAM or sometimes disks. Further, the encryption and decryption of data are done outside HSM. So, I know my disk encrypted with KMS is not protected from AWS. But I guess the audits help here. Also, client side encryption works for things like backups. End to end encryption rules out a lot of features. Therefore lot of companies store data in plaintext (data base, web servers, user facing services etc).

unstatusthequo 4y ago

I de-clouded 40TB this past year, so it is a thing. I think for cloud it became too easy to just spin things up and never delete.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

lamontcg 4y ago

"Death of Cloud predicted, film at 11"