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> My go to line here is that Cloud was a ZIRP. Like the whole entire thing. Took us ~10 years to wind up the cloud, and it will take years to unwind it, but the

> My go to line here is that Cloud was a ZIRP. Like the whole entire thing. Took us ~10 years to wind up the cloud, and it will take years to unwind it, but the mass migration away is already happening. This is Hacker News echo chamber stuff. There is certainly no mass migration away from the cloud. Yes, I personally saw companies in the 2010s say "we're moving everything to the cloud!" without adequate planning or cost analysis and then saying "OK, everyone off the cloud" once they got an insane cloud bill. But cloud costs can be managed, and for many, many companies the cost of hiring people to manage all this infrastructure and services is usually way more than a well-managed cloud project. Also, the canonical rationale I see on HN for moving away from the cloud is "I can just rent a box for $X/month". If all you're using the cloud for is a dumb, static set of compute, I agree that you can probably do it cheaper on your own. I know hardly any companies (from small startups to large enterprises) who use the cloud that way.

rco8786 3y ago
> for many, many companies the cost of hiring people to manage all this infrastructure and services is usually way more than a well-managed cloud project. Yea, this is the line that everyone uses. I've worked at these companies, and the reality just doesn't line up with that. You end up still needing your whole Ops team, they're just building cloud tooling instead of on-prem tooling. As to whether or not the migration away is happening...major cloud providers are already seeing people leave, and profits starting to contract. It's very early. Like I said in the original post, it took us a long time to wind up the cloud and it's going to take a long time to come back to reality. Something roughly cloud-shaped will probably always remain..there are some legit use cases especially for companies that have spiky load profiles. I don't mean we're literally going back to running servers out of our IT closets. I just mean that as a whole we're going to be moving back to simpler deployments, simpler architectures, and most importantly, fixed/predictable costs.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  > I just mean that as a whole we're going to be moving back to simpler deployments, simpler architectures, and most importantly, fixed/predictable costs. That I can definitely agree with, I just believe that's fully possible to do with cloud (for the most part, though there are certainly some head turners like the recent news that AWS was charging for forbidden attempts on private S3 buckets, which is bonkers) and cloud cost management tools.
  - rco8786 3y ago
    Yea that’s totally fair. I think we’re using slightly different definitions of “cloud” here. I’m mainly focused on the managed services/abstractions, things that abstract away the server itself and are usage based billed. But firing up a few ec2 instances is still technically “the cloud”, you are right.
npalli 3y ago
No, not HN echo chamber. 83% of CIOs want to move workloads back to on-prem or private cloud. https://x.com/michaeldell/status/1780672823167742135?s=46&t=BBEvy3cvqJ6LT35SuLG75w https://x.com/michaeldell/status/1780672823167742135?s=46&t=...
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  I would take that with a giant tub of salt: 1. As the saying goes, talk is cheap. It's one thing to ask "What do you plan to do?" vs. what you actually do. Look at revenue graphs for AWS, Azure and GCP over the past 5-10 years, right up until the end of 2023. They are definitely not shrinking. 2. I'd be more than a bit skeptical of the messenger, given that Dell obviously has a vested interest in telling people they need to buy more servers. 3. Even if you take what the surveyed CIOs say at face value, asking "Are you planning to move some workloads back to private cloud/on-prem from public cloud" is totally consistent with what I said. There was rush of "just put everything on the cloud" without thinking through it strategically. But just because you're pulling back on a few ill-thought-out cloud projects doesn't mean that overall industry-wide public cloud investment isn't still skyrocketing.

rco8786 3y ago

> for many, many companies the cost of hiring people to manage all this infrastructure and services is usually way more than a well-managed cloud project. Yea, this is the line that everyone uses. I've worked at these companies, and the reality just doesn't line up with that. You end up still needing your whole Ops team, they're just building cloud tooling instead of on-prem tooling. As to whether or not the migration away is happening...major cloud providers are already seeing people leave, and profits starting to contract. It's very early. Like I said in the original post, it took us a long time to wind up the cloud and it's going to take a long time to come back to reality. Something roughly cloud-shaped will probably always remain..there are some legit use cases especially for companies that have spiky load profiles. I don't mean we're literally going back to running servers out of our IT closets. I just mean that as a whole we're going to be moving back to simpler deployments, simpler architectures, and most importantly, fixed/predictable costs.

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
> I just mean that as a whole we're going to be moving back to simpler deployments, simpler architectures, and most importantly, fixed/predictable costs. That I can definitely agree with, I just believe that's fully possible to do with cloud (for the most part, though there are certainly some head turners like the recent news that AWS was charging for forbidden attempts on private S3 buckets, which is bonkers) and cloud cost management tools.
- rco8786 3y ago
  Yea that’s totally fair. I think we’re using slightly different definitions of “cloud” here. I’m mainly focused on the managed services/abstractions, things that abstract away the server itself and are usage based billed. But firing up a few ec2 instances is still technically “the cloud”, you are right.

npalli 3y ago

No, not HN echo chamber. 83% of CIOs want to move workloads back to on-prem or private cloud. https://x.com/michaeldell/status/1780672823167742135?s=46&t=BBEvy3cvqJ6LT35SuLG75w https://x.com/michaeldell/status/1780672823167742135?s=46&t=...

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
I would take that with a giant tub of salt: 1. As the saying goes, talk is cheap. It's one thing to ask "What do you plan to do?" vs. what you actually do. Look at revenue graphs for AWS, Azure and GCP over the past 5-10 years, right up until the end of 2023. They are definitely not shrinking. 2. I'd be more than a bit skeptical of the messenger, given that Dell obviously has a vested interest in telling people they need to buy more servers. 3. Even if you take what the surveyed CIOs say at face value, asking "Are you planning to move some workloads back to private cloud/on-prem from public cloud" is totally consistent with what I said. There was rush of "just put everything on the cloud" without thinking through it strategically. But just because you're pulling back on a few ill-thought-out cloud projects doesn't mean that overall industry-wide public cloud investment isn't still skyrocketing.