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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 t

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.
bena 4y ago
If cloud is only expensive when done poorly and it's not easy to do properly, then that's actually a problem with cloud. If managing cloud is skill-intensive and you need a hire a person/team with specific skills in it, then you're no different from on-prem from a personnel perspective. And those are growing pains. In 5 years time, maybe the proper controls/cost containment will be easier because we've seen how easy it is to fuck it up.
- Aqueous 4y ago
  What's easier - managing cloud costs or managing a datacenter or co-located physical hardware and setting up and maintaining all the functionality you need to do proper CI / deployments / monitor uptime / data analytics?
  - XCSme 4y ago
    I think the solution is midway: rent dedicated servers from hosting companies that handle the co-location, hardware failure and all hosting-specific issues. So you run your own services on their hardware (as opposed to using cloud SaaS, where you rent both the hardware AND the service).
  - vidarh 4y ago
    With modern hardware the two are in practice not very different. You set up a server for your hardware to boot for to install the OS, tie it into your orchestrator of choice, and your users see the same thing. If a server fails you treat in instance failing, diagnose via IPMI, and either take the server off or reboot/power cycle (remotely, via IPMI), or tell your hosting provider to swap in new drives. If you spend more than a single digit percentage of your devops effort managing hardware in a co-located setup vs. doing the same higher level things you would in a cloud environment, you're doing something wrong.
  - bena 4y ago
    All I'm saying is that most people are used to doing one and one is relatively new. We're comparing an ideal version of cloud to practical versions of on-prem. When the ideal version becomes practical, it might be a no-brainer. But for now, companies are going to have to do what's best for them today.
faeriechangling 4y ago
Competence isn't an unlimited resource. On-prem is nearly impossible to run without regularly taking your servers or storage or networks down with incompetent staff. Cloud costs will make your eyes water with incompetent staff who decide to run everything 24/7 on over-provisioned overpriced vms. At the end of the day "but if we had awesome staff (that also didn't ask for too much in salary) it would be like this and that" is an academic consideration because that's not the hand we're playing with. Cloud is also so centralised that even if everybody collectively got better at optimising costs there's a serious risk that cloud vendors would just collectively fatten their margins. The inverse is also true, if on-prem suddenly became much easier to run, expect licensing and hardware costs to start creeping up from anybody with anything resembling a monopoly or cartel.

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.

bena 4y ago

If cloud is only expensive when done poorly and it's not easy to do properly, then that's actually a problem with cloud. If managing cloud is skill-intensive and you need a hire a person/team with specific skills in it, then you're no different from on-prem from a personnel perspective. And those are growing pains. In 5 years time, maybe the proper controls/cost containment will be easier because we've seen how easy it is to fuck it up.

Aqueous 4y ago
What's easier - managing cloud costs or managing a datacenter or co-located physical hardware and setting up and maintaining all the functionality you need to do proper CI / deployments / monitor uptime / data analytics?
- XCSme 4y ago
  I think the solution is midway: rent dedicated servers from hosting companies that handle the co-location, hardware failure and all hosting-specific issues. So you run your own services on their hardware (as opposed to using cloud SaaS, where you rent both the hardware AND the service).
- vidarh 4y ago
  With modern hardware the two are in practice not very different. You set up a server for your hardware to boot for to install the OS, tie it into your orchestrator of choice, and your users see the same thing. If a server fails you treat in instance failing, diagnose via IPMI, and either take the server off or reboot/power cycle (remotely, via IPMI), or tell your hosting provider to swap in new drives. If you spend more than a single digit percentage of your devops effort managing hardware in a co-located setup vs. doing the same higher level things you would in a cloud environment, you're doing something wrong.
- bena 4y ago
  All I'm saying is that most people are used to doing one and one is relatively new. We're comparing an ideal version of cloud to practical versions of on-prem. When the ideal version becomes practical, it might be a no-brainer. But for now, companies are going to have to do what's best for them today.

faeriechangling 4y ago

Competence isn't an unlimited resource. On-prem is nearly impossible to run without regularly taking your servers or storage or networks down with incompetent staff. Cloud costs will make your eyes water with incompetent staff who decide to run everything 24/7 on over-provisioned overpriced vms. At the end of the day "but if we had awesome staff (that also didn't ask for too much in salary) it would be like this and that" is an academic consideration because that's not the hand we're playing with. Cloud is also so centralised that even if everybody collectively got better at optimising costs there's a serious risk that cloud vendors would just collectively fatten their margins. The inverse is also true, if on-prem suddenly became much easier to run, expect licensing and hardware costs to start creeping up from anybody with anything resembling a monopoly or cartel.