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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 t

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.