9 ms·

As a public cloud engineer, it feels like this is a mistake to cut deeply right when cloud repatriation is starting to be a thing.

asylteltine 3y ago
Cloud repatriation is a myth perpetuated by consulting companies to get more hours. No one is seriously considering moving off the cloud
- Jordanpomeroy 3y ago
  False
- LargeTomato 3y ago
  [flagged]
- allenrb 3y ago
  I honestly cannot tell if this comment is a joke or not.
wmf 3y ago
Why bother repatriating to VMware? It's probably more expensive.
- ghaff 3y ago
  Yeah. Repatriation is probably an overstated trend even if companies are generally getting smarter about where and how they run workloads. But, while it's hard to migrate companies off VMware to a different on-prem solution, I'm not sure that you'll see workloads being repatriated going onto VMware (unless the company already has a large installed base).
- alephnerd 3y ago
  Most F1000s use ESXi by default. You can concentrate only on direct sales to F1000s and make more than enough revenue. Look at Zscaler and Crowdstrike for examples - both follow this strategy. As a business, you optimize for Net Revenue after Cost of Operation. It's always good to drop customers if it costs more to support them than the revenue you get.
  - wmf 3y ago
    Right, but those companies don't benefit from repatriation. Their on-prem IT is more expensive than public cloud.
    - alephnerd 3y ago
      > Their on-prem IT is more expensive than public cloud. Not really. Most of those companies have lax Cloud Cost Management hygiene and/or the Cloud Platform team is separate from the Infra/Servers team. If you are F250 you can probably negotiate a nice discount if you are able to fully migrate to a single cloud, but most companies don't want to keep all their eggs in a single basket. This means larger organizations cannot avail competitive discounts on public cloud. By bundling Private Cloud (VMWare ESXi), Network Security (VMWare NSX), APM (CA Wiley), Endpoint Protection (Symantec Enterprise), and Data Security (Symantec Enterprise) I can purchase 5 critical pieces of Enterprise Infrastructure using a single PO. This is critical at large organizations as any PO above $30k almost always requires CFO or Comptroller approval, and a single PO to Broadcom satisfies your Infra, DevOps, and Security needs (which are all cost centers if you aren't a tech company). Btw, Broadcom themselves is almost entirely on GCP [0]. Almost all their infra and products are served using a GCP stack on the backend. [0] - https://www.broadcom.com/blog/broadcoms-transformation-journey-with-google-cloud https://www.broadcom.com/blog/broadcoms-transformation-journ...
      - wmf 3y ago
        Who do you work for BTW?
        alephnerd 3y ago
        PE/VC in the Enterprise space now. I used to be a PM and SWE and a staffer for a hot second. Not at Broadcom but have worked closely with their team and alumni. The Enterprise Infra space is a small world. Edit: Also, I didn't realize I'm replying to an actual legend in the systems/networking space. I read some of your papers when I was an undergrad and later as an early career SWE.
      - 3y ago
alephnerd 3y ago
Broadcom's strategy is to remove sustaining engineering or deprecate product lines with limited uptake by F1000 customers. Also, VMWare has A LOT of fat to trim. I've worked closely with teams and alumni of Broadcom/Avago, VMWare, CA Technologies, and Symantec, and honestly, the cuts Broadcom does are pretty reasonable.
- Turbots 3y ago
  [dead]
- gwbas1c 3y ago
  > VMWare has A LOT of fat to trim Oh, VMware is the 2nd shortest job in my career, primarily for that reason. I don't want to say much in a public forum, but my best lesson from working at VMware is how to sniff out an incompetent engineer early in a job interview: I just ask coding questions that a VMWare engineer would get wrong. For example: I have an engineer write some very basic manual SQL data mapping code. If the candidate really pushes back, or just can't figure it out, I move on. I ask a question where the engineer should use an enum instead of a string. If the engineer uses an enum, I move on.
  - alephnerd 3y ago
    I used to do that as well when I was still a SWE and then a PM. VMWare has good talent (when I first became a PM a long time ago, I was mentored by a very smart VMWare PM alum), but it also has a lot of empire building (when I first became a SWE a large portion of my management was VMWare EM alumni who weren't that impressive). Also, a lot of their early management feel like one hit wonders in my experience working with them. It reminds me of how PANW was before Arora joined and cleaned house, and Symantec/CA before Broadcom cleaned house.
    - FireBeyond 3y ago
      > Also, a lot of their early management feel like one hit wonders in my experience working with them. And many of those one hits were ideas crafted and handed to them for implementation (still valuable and important), but left to distill ideas on their own? Not so much.
redwood 3y ago
Have you seen evidence that it's a thing? I've seen evidence of it being a useful threat, just as multi-cloud is. The company that most publicly "did it" ended up plateauing as they stopped innovating on anything other than that backend migration and plus they likely would have gotten the cost they looked for from the hyperscalers if they'd continued to negotiate. But maybe I'm missing something?
- AmericanChopper 3y ago
  I’ve had the pleasure of contracting on a cloud migration project, and then a little while later an on-prem migration for the same project. I helped that company build a cost model for comparing their on-prem and cloud workloads, and they ended up moving quite a bit back on-prem. Even for the workloads they didn’t move, having a better way of comparing on-prem and cloud TCOs helped them negotiate much better pricing for their remaining cloud workloads. One legitimate challenge is that it’s actually rather difficult to measure the TCO of each option. I’ve seen companies pushed to get better at that as they experience cloud sticker shock, and as large enterprise pushes more and more work to the cloud, I’d expect to see them continue to improve in this area.
- DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
  > Have you seen evidence that it's a thing? Only anecdotally - though the stuff I've seen is more about undoing the mistake of letting anyone at the company run-up massive bills on cloud-only big-data-processing (CosmosDB, Data Lake, etc). The only other "repatriation" movement I've seen are orgs who got burned by limitations and glitches in things like OneDrive/GoogleDrive - again, this doesn't really come under VMware's remit.
  - FireBeyond 3y ago
    The other big thing to realize is that for VMware, and Red Hat (I used to work on the OpenShift team) is that cloud might be big, but our last estimates were that 80% of our workloads and capacity were on-prem/hybrid, not cloud.
    - 3y ago
gwbas1c 3y ago
> cloud repatriation You can repatriate VMWare VMs from someone else's datacenter to your datacenter. You might even be able to do it with little downtime. (I vaguely remember that VMWare has 0-downtime movement of a VM among physical hardware.)
- woleium 3y ago
  its called vmotion iirc, and it costs more money than we had when i looked at it
- auspiv 3y ago
  vMotion. works great
- nolist_policy 3y ago
  There's nothing special about live migration, really. The major implementations (VMWare, Hyper-V, KVM/Qemu, Xen, ...) support it for a long time, including shared-nothing migration.
scarface_74 3y ago
Do you have any evidence that this happening besides random anecdotes?

asylteltine 3y ago

Cloud repatriation is a myth perpetuated by consulting companies to get more hours. No one is seriously considering moving off the cloud

Jordanpomeroy 3y ago
False
LargeTomato 3y ago
[flagged]
allenrb 3y ago
I honestly cannot tell if this comment is a joke or not.

wmf 3y ago

Why bother repatriating to VMware? It's probably more expensive.

ghaff 3y ago
Yeah. Repatriation is probably an overstated trend even if companies are generally getting smarter about where and how they run workloads. But, while it's hard to migrate companies off VMware to a different on-prem solution, I'm not sure that you'll see workloads being repatriated going onto VMware (unless the company already has a large installed base).
alephnerd 3y ago
Most F1000s use ESXi by default. You can concentrate only on direct sales to F1000s and make more than enough revenue. Look at Zscaler and Crowdstrike for examples - both follow this strategy. As a business, you optimize for Net Revenue after Cost of Operation. It's always good to drop customers if it costs more to support them than the revenue you get.
- wmf 3y ago
  Right, but those companies don't benefit from repatriation. Their on-prem IT is more expensive than public cloud.
  - alephnerd 3y ago
    > Their on-prem IT is more expensive than public cloud. Not really. Most of those companies have lax Cloud Cost Management hygiene and/or the Cloud Platform team is separate from the Infra/Servers team. If you are F250 you can probably negotiate a nice discount if you are able to fully migrate to a single cloud, but most companies don't want to keep all their eggs in a single basket. This means larger organizations cannot avail competitive discounts on public cloud. By bundling Private Cloud (VMWare ESXi), Network Security (VMWare NSX), APM (CA Wiley), Endpoint Protection (Symantec Enterprise), and Data Security (Symantec Enterprise) I can purchase 5 critical pieces of Enterprise Infrastructure using a single PO. This is critical at large organizations as any PO above $30k almost always requires CFO or Comptroller approval, and a single PO to Broadcom satisfies your Infra, DevOps, and Security needs (which are all cost centers if you aren't a tech company). Btw, Broadcom themselves is almost entirely on GCP [0]. Almost all their infra and products are served using a GCP stack on the backend. [0] - https://www.broadcom.com/blog/broadcoms-transformation-journey-with-google-cloud https://www.broadcom.com/blog/broadcoms-transformation-journ...
    - wmf 3y ago
      Who do you work for BTW?
      - alephnerd 3y ago
        PE/VC in the Enterprise space now. I used to be a PM and SWE and a staffer for a hot second. Not at Broadcom but have worked closely with their team and alumni. The Enterprise Infra space is a small world. Edit: Also, I didn't realize I'm replying to an actual legend in the systems/networking space. I read some of your papers when I was an undergrad and later as an early career SWE.
    - 3y ago

alephnerd 3y ago

Broadcom's strategy is to remove sustaining engineering or deprecate product lines with limited uptake by F1000 customers. Also, VMWare has A LOT of fat to trim. I've worked closely with teams and alumni of Broadcom/Avago, VMWare, CA Technologies, and Symantec, and honestly, the cuts Broadcom does are pretty reasonable.

Turbots 3y ago
[dead]
gwbas1c 3y ago
> VMWare has A LOT of fat to trim Oh, VMware is the 2nd shortest job in my career, primarily for that reason. I don't want to say much in a public forum, but my best lesson from working at VMware is how to sniff out an incompetent engineer early in a job interview: I just ask coding questions that a VMWare engineer would get wrong. For example: I have an engineer write some very basic manual SQL data mapping code. If the candidate really pushes back, or just can't figure it out, I move on. I ask a question where the engineer should use an enum instead of a string. If the engineer uses an enum, I move on.
- alephnerd 3y ago
  I used to do that as well when I was still a SWE and then a PM. VMWare has good talent (when I first became a PM a long time ago, I was mentored by a very smart VMWare PM alum), but it also has a lot of empire building (when I first became a SWE a large portion of my management was VMWare EM alumni who weren't that impressive). Also, a lot of their early management feel like one hit wonders in my experience working with them. It reminds me of how PANW was before Arora joined and cleaned house, and Symantec/CA before Broadcom cleaned house.
  - FireBeyond 3y ago
    > Also, a lot of their early management feel like one hit wonders in my experience working with them. And many of those one hits were ideas crafted and handed to them for implementation (still valuable and important), but left to distill ideas on their own? Not so much.

redwood 3y ago

Have you seen evidence that it's a thing? I've seen evidence of it being a useful threat, just as multi-cloud is. The company that most publicly "did it" ended up plateauing as they stopped innovating on anything other than that backend migration and plus they likely would have gotten the cost they looked for from the hyperscalers if they'd continued to negotiate. But maybe I'm missing something?

AmericanChopper 3y ago
I’ve had the pleasure of contracting on a cloud migration project, and then a little while later an on-prem migration for the same project. I helped that company build a cost model for comparing their on-prem and cloud workloads, and they ended up moving quite a bit back on-prem. Even for the workloads they didn’t move, having a better way of comparing on-prem and cloud TCOs helped them negotiate much better pricing for their remaining cloud workloads. One legitimate challenge is that it’s actually rather difficult to measure the TCO of each option. I’ve seen companies pushed to get better at that as they experience cloud sticker shock, and as large enterprise pushes more and more work to the cloud, I’d expect to see them continue to improve in this area.
DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
> Have you seen evidence that it's a thing? Only anecdotally - though the stuff I've seen is more about undoing the mistake of letting anyone at the company run-up massive bills on cloud-only big-data-processing (CosmosDB, Data Lake, etc). The only other "repatriation" movement I've seen are orgs who got burned by limitations and glitches in things like OneDrive/GoogleDrive - again, this doesn't really come under VMware's remit.
- FireBeyond 3y ago
  The other big thing to realize is that for VMware, and Red Hat (I used to work on the OpenShift team) is that cloud might be big, but our last estimates were that 80% of our workloads and capacity were on-prem/hybrid, not cloud.
  - 3y ago

gwbas1c 3y ago

> cloud repatriation You can repatriate VMWare VMs from someone else's datacenter to your datacenter. You might even be able to do it with little downtime. (I vaguely remember that VMWare has 0-downtime movement of a VM among physical hardware.)

woleium 3y ago
its called vmotion iirc, and it costs more money than we had when i looked at it
auspiv 3y ago
vMotion. works great
nolist_policy 3y ago
There's nothing special about live migration, really. The major implementations (VMWare, Hyper-V, KVM/Qemu, Xen, ...) support it for a long time, including shared-nothing migration.

scarface_74 3y ago

Do you have any evidence that this happening besides random anecdotes?