| Why stay on premise? Cost. On-prem is roughly on-par in an average case, in my experience, but we've got many cases where we've optimized against hardware configurations that are significantly cheaper to create on-prem. And sunk costs are real. It's much easier to get approval for instances that don't add to the bottom line. But for that matter, we try to get our on-prem at close to 100% utilization, which keeps costs well below cloud. If I've got bursty loads, those can go to the cloud. Lock-in. I don't trust any of the big cloud providers not to jack my rates up. I don't trust my engineers not to make use of proprietary APIs that get me stuck there. Related to cost, but also its own issue, data transfer. Both latency and throughput. Yeah, it's buzzwordy, but the edge is a thing. I have many clients where getting processing in the same location where the data is being generated saves ungodly amounts of money in bandwidth, or where it wouldn't even been feasible to transfer the data off-site. Financial sector clients also tend to appreciate shaving off milliseconds. Also, regulatory compliance. And, let's be honest, corporate and actual politics. Inertia. Trust. Risk. Interoperability with existing systems. Few decisions about where to stick your compute and storage are trivial; few times is one answer always right. But there are many, many factors to consider, and they may not be the obvious ones that make the decision for you. |