[mkozlows]

So two things:

1. Cloud providers are making it easy for legacy businesses to take baby steps. You don't have to use a NoSQL solution with AWS Dynamo, you can use Postgres with RDS. Or if you're hyper-conservative/stuck with legacy stuff, you can run Oracle with RDS. Or get an EC2 instance and install your own personal copy of Oracle on it. You don't have to jump to full modernity right away, you can take the easy wins of hosted infrastructure first, and only later move up to the bigger wins of hosted platforms.

2. Yes, legacy stuff takes forever to disappear. There are still businesses running VMS inside of VAX emulators with COBOL apps on them. But once you're in that "super-conservative businesses won't move away from you anytime soon" area, you're in a declining market. New businesses unencumbered by legacy won't go down that road -- small businesses starting today will never buy an on-site server to start with (thanks to Office 365/Google Apps/etc.), and as they grow there's no reason for them to change that policy anymore. EMC might never get a new customer, and even if they keep their old ones for some time, it's just a question of how fast their decline is.

[zaphar]

    Or get an EC2 instance and install your own personal copy 
    of Oracle on it.

Good luck with the licensing for running Oracle on an EC2 instance. How many different cores will Oracle potentially be running on? Thousands with the way EC2 works. Just wait till Oracle does an audit and watch your back licensing fees skyrocket. But don't worry! There's a way out. Just move it all to Oracle's new in house cloud. They'll even help with the move for a very "reasonable" consulting fee.

[protomyth]

No doubt. I tried to move our Oracle installation[1] from an aging box to our VMWare server and the price jump was going to be something on the order of 5x.

1) another one of those fun vendor software needs Oracle things

[discodave]

That's why AWS launched dedicated instances, pretty much for exactly this use case.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-ec2-dedicated-instan...

:)

[evook]

Working at real scale, I'd choose some cages in a datacenter I can walk in and place offices at over AWS anytime.

Btw you'd cry if I were allowed call out some companies that still run lotus notes.

[mkozlows]

Lotus Notes is a fine example of what we're talking about. Yes, companies use it, but no company is ever going to switch to Notes. The companies that use Notes in 2020 is going to be the ones that use it in 2015 minus the ones that quit using it. That's what "walking dead" means.

[vonmoltke]

> Btw you'd cry if I were allowed call out some companies that still run lotus notes.

I worked for one (Raytheon). :/

[discodave]

This makes no sense.

How many Amazon, Google or Microsoft engineers (or even SREs) have ever set foot in one of their datacenters.

Hint: the answer is basically none.