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Martin Casado is one of the smartest people I've met in my career in IT (AWS, VMware, etc). This phrase is key: "You’re crazy if you don’t start in the cloud;

Martin Casado is one of the smartest people I've met in my career in IT (AWS, VMware, etc). This phrase is key: "You’re crazy if you don’t start in the cloud; you’re crazy if you stay on it" Perhaps I'd say that "you're crazy if you keep all your IT on it, as you scale". There's still a case to be made for a small % of your workloads in the cloud. The flexibility is priceless. But for everything else, there's a well managed on-prem. Side note: interesting how, after Mark Andreessen's disastrous post on techno-optimism a few days ago, I approached the reading of this article with rolled eyes and low expectations. Seeing Marting Casado as the author immediately changed it, however.

nonrandomstring 3y ago
> "You’re crazy if you don't start in the cloud; you're crazy if you stay on it" Spot on. Gonna have to steal that for my next meeting. Although, given the potential Cavium-Marvell TPM issue viz ECC and that we're not really there with homomorphic compute, I might make a caveat for developers working on very sensitive new ideas; Keep it on-prem until you have a good enough security segmentation to push out what you're happy with on untrusted cloud infra.
tight-ship 3y ago
> Perhaps I'd say that "you're crazy if you keep all your IT on it, as you scale". And by scale, I think companies should be at least in the double digit millions spent in cloud infrastructure before they start building out their own. Everybody is used to the cloud APIs and going back to the old days of managing things in a static datacenter are not coming back for these companies.
deleted 3y ago
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acdha 3y ago
> But for everything else, there's a well managed on-prem. That’s begging a number of questions, however - the number of places who can approach a cloud service portfolio at all, much less with a cost savings or security parity, has to be at least an order of magnitude smaller than the number of places who incorrectly thought they could.
- guiriduro 3y ago
  It does beg the question, but your point about orgs "incorrectly" thinking they could move some parts of their portfolio off-cloud begs several more. I would like to see it fleshed out a bit, into some high level rules of thumb, to guide, e.g. IaaS Cloud for: Flexibility; very spikey compute; modest to normal egress; low to moderate interruptible AI workloads (use spot); modest to normal storage, large if properly tiered and tradeoffs ok; lower effort HA; client reqs (but make them pay for it); security model (non-portable); Integrated turnkey DBaaS; Iff you have FinOps, careful scale-in policies for DevOps, or are stuck non-portable Off-cloud (CDN, Hyperscale compute, *aaS, on-prem) Fit on a $5 VPS; Have simpler neat 12 factor PaaSy container workloads (Fly/Vercel); Well-defined heavy workloads; heavy egress (use CDN); heavy non-interruptible AI/specialist compute; large storage (CDN for objects) or compute-local with high IO (colo, onprem); HA with more effort; Specialist DB or boutique DBaaS (Supabase); Portable security (k8s) Iff you have invested in portability (containers, k8s, FaaS frameworks, interruptible workloads, high level APIs), HA testing and appopriate security
quickthrower2 3y ago
> "You’re crazy if you don’t start in the cloud; you’re crazy if you stay on it" This doesn't help much. It doesn't talk about hybrid. What about AI. Do I go buy a bunch of H100s at peak price when something better/cheaper might be out in 3 years. What if my load is spikey. It should be perhaps "You're crazy if you are not strategic with cloud vs. on premise spending"
- anyoneamous 3y ago
  3 years ain't what it used to be - A100s were launched over 3 years ago and lots of people are still happy when they can get hold of some on AWS. People buying H100s now will very likely still be getting good value out of them in 2027.

nonrandomstring 3y ago

> "You’re crazy if you don't start in the cloud; you're crazy if you stay on it" Spot on. Gonna have to steal that for my next meeting. Although, given the potential Cavium-Marvell TPM issue viz ECC and that we're not really there with homomorphic compute, I might make a caveat for developers working on very sensitive new ideas; Keep it on-prem until you have a good enough security segmentation to push out what you're happy with on untrusted cloud infra.

tight-ship 3y ago

> Perhaps I'd say that "you're crazy if you keep all your IT on it, as you scale". And by scale, I think companies should be at least in the double digit millions spent in cloud infrastructure before they start building out their own. Everybody is used to the cloud APIs and going back to the old days of managing things in a static datacenter are not coming back for these companies.

deleted 3y ago

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acdha 3y ago

> But for everything else, there's a well managed on-prem. That’s begging a number of questions, however - the number of places who can approach a cloud service portfolio at all, much less with a cost savings or security parity, has to be at least an order of magnitude smaller than the number of places who incorrectly thought they could.

guiriduro 3y ago
It does beg the question, but your point about orgs "incorrectly" thinking they could move some parts of their portfolio off-cloud begs several more. I would like to see it fleshed out a bit, into some high level rules of thumb, to guide, e.g. IaaS Cloud for: Flexibility; very spikey compute; modest to normal egress; low to moderate interruptible AI workloads (use spot); modest to normal storage, large if properly tiered and tradeoffs ok; lower effort HA; client reqs (but make them pay for it); security model (non-portable); Integrated turnkey DBaaS; Iff you have FinOps, careful scale-in policies for DevOps, or are stuck non-portable Off-cloud (CDN, Hyperscale compute, *aaS, on-prem) Fit on a $5 VPS; Have simpler neat 12 factor PaaSy container workloads (Fly/Vercel); Well-defined heavy workloads; heavy egress (use CDN); heavy non-interruptible AI/specialist compute; large storage (CDN for objects) or compute-local with high IO (colo, onprem); HA with more effort; Specialist DB or boutique DBaaS (Supabase); Portable security (k8s) Iff you have invested in portability (containers, k8s, FaaS frameworks, interruptible workloads, high level APIs), HA testing and appopriate security

quickthrower2 3y ago

> "You’re crazy if you don’t start in the cloud; you’re crazy if you stay on it" This doesn't help much. It doesn't talk about hybrid. What about AI. Do I go buy a bunch of H100s at peak price when something better/cheaper might be out in 3 years. What if my load is spikey. It should be perhaps "You're crazy if you are not strategic with cloud vs. on premise spending"

anyoneamous 3y ago
3 years ain't what it used to be - A100s were launched over 3 years ago and lots of people are still happy when they can get hold of some on AWS. People buying H100s now will very likely still be getting good value out of them in 2027.