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Is there any indication at all that this is due to businesses bringing their hardware back on-prem? Do you think "history repeats itself" will hold true in the

Is there any indication at all that this is due to businesses bringing their hardware back on-prem? Do you think "history repeats itself" will hold true in the on-prem v. cloud realm?

wongarsu 2y ago
Anecdotally it seems like the rose-tinted glasses are coming off in terms of the amount of money and work saved by moving towards the cloud. Of course those aren't the only reasons to move to the cloud. But a lot of companies moved to the cloud due to promises and expectations that didn't pan out, so at least some of them moving back is only natural. Especially with many new solutions around private cloud and serverless allowing them to bring the "good parts" of the cloud to hardware they own or rent. That's just the normal hype cycle playing out.
jeffbee 2y ago
Why do you believe that could be a related phenomenon? How much server market is going to non-cloud vs. cloud? Some analysts estimate the global server market last year at $95 to $150 billion. AWS spent $48 billion on capital last year. Google bought $32 billion in capital, most of which is "on-prem" from their perspective. A switch in the machine-of-the-day from Intel to AMD at one of these large buyers could easily cause the slight change in market share mentioned in the article. Overall I think a lot of people continue to underestimate the size of the heavy hitters on the buy side of the server market.
- scrapcode 2y ago
  Why wouldn't it be a viable reason? Every customer that AWS and Google have has the potential to make that decision and I believe it gets more appetizing with every data breach / funnel failure / etc.
  - jeffbee 2y ago
    Every indicator we have is that movement to the cloud is a massive tidal wave, and all we have on the retreat to on-prem is a handful of anecdotes and vibes. It's really up to the proponent of such an argument to provide some evidence for the extraordinary claim that return to on-prem is signifiant enough to influence server market share (or even establish that such revanchists would prefer AMD more than cloud buyers do).
    - bluGill 2y ago
      I doubt there will be a move to on-prem so much as places that already knew for their workload the cloud didn't make sense will be a little more careful and so not move. For many servers the cloud makes sense though, and so I think we will see places move more and more as they see the value of the cloud. For a large company with accountants they can do the accounting math, and a rack or two of servers is expensive - it need real estate, trained employees, managers for those employees, HVAC, power, backup servers, backup power, .... This adds up faster than on-prem advocates think. Many of those costs are things that work better in data center sized warehouse than a smaller company and so cloud can often be the a lower price once you really add up the costs. This is particularly true if you can share cloud resources in some way.
    - marcosdumay 2y ago
      > the retreat to on-prem On-prem only makes sense for really large organizations, exactly the ones that can negotiate with cloud providers. What I do expect to see eventually is a large movement towards commodity IaaS providers. And those tend to be middle-sized and not design their own hardware, so they act like the on-premises market. (But I can't say I'm seeing any movement here either.)
keyringlight 2y ago
One thing I wonder about is whether it's the long term effects of things like spectre/meltdown coming home to roost. I can only speculate as I'm not in the server industry, but IIRC with the mitigations that reduced performance intel benefited a lot with companies buying more servers to make up the shortfall while AMD Zen was still proving itself to what seems like a conservative market. Has the "no one ever got fired for buying X" reputation shifted?

Is there any indication at all that this is due to businesses bringing their hardware back on-prem? Do you think "history repeats itself" will hold true in the on-prem v. cloud realm?

wongarsu 2y ago

Anecdotally it seems like the rose-tinted glasses are coming off in terms of the amount of money and work saved by moving towards the cloud. Of course those aren't the only reasons to move to the cloud. But a lot of companies moved to the cloud due to promises and expectations that didn't pan out, so at least some of them moving back is only natural. Especially with many new solutions around private cloud and serverless allowing them to bring the "good parts" of the cloud to hardware they own or rent. That's just the normal hype cycle playing out.

jeffbee 2y ago

Why do you believe that could be a related phenomenon? How much server market is going to non-cloud vs. cloud? Some analysts estimate the global server market last year at $95 to $150 billion. AWS spent $48 billion on capital last year. Google bought $32 billion in capital, most of which is "on-prem" from their perspective. A switch in the machine-of-the-day from Intel to AMD at one of these large buyers could easily cause the slight change in market share mentioned in the article. Overall I think a lot of people continue to underestimate the size of the heavy hitters on the buy side of the server market.

scrapcode 2y ago
Why wouldn't it be a viable reason? Every customer that AWS and Google have has the potential to make that decision and I believe it gets more appetizing with every data breach / funnel failure / etc.
- jeffbee 2y ago
  Every indicator we have is that movement to the cloud is a massive tidal wave, and all we have on the retreat to on-prem is a handful of anecdotes and vibes. It's really up to the proponent of such an argument to provide some evidence for the extraordinary claim that return to on-prem is signifiant enough to influence server market share (or even establish that such revanchists would prefer AMD more than cloud buyers do).
  - bluGill 2y ago
    I doubt there will be a move to on-prem so much as places that already knew for their workload the cloud didn't make sense will be a little more careful and so not move. For many servers the cloud makes sense though, and so I think we will see places move more and more as they see the value of the cloud. For a large company with accountants they can do the accounting math, and a rack or two of servers is expensive - it need real estate, trained employees, managers for those employees, HVAC, power, backup servers, backup power, .... This adds up faster than on-prem advocates think. Many of those costs are things that work better in data center sized warehouse than a smaller company and so cloud can often be the a lower price once you really add up the costs. This is particularly true if you can share cloud resources in some way.
  - marcosdumay 2y ago
    > the retreat to on-prem On-prem only makes sense for really large organizations, exactly the ones that can negotiate with cloud providers. What I do expect to see eventually is a large movement towards commodity IaaS providers. And those tend to be middle-sized and not design their own hardware, so they act like the on-premises market. (But I can't say I'm seeing any movement here either.)

keyringlight 2y ago

One thing I wonder about is whether it's the long term effects of things like spectre/meltdown coming home to roost. I can only speculate as I'm not in the server industry, but IIRC with the mitigations that reduced performance intel benefited a lot with companies buying more servers to make up the shortfall while AMD Zen was still proving itself to what seems like a conservative market. Has the "no one ever got fired for buying X" reputation shifted?