[gzu]

That's what I don't quite understand about the current state of cloud computing. We're seeing huge advances in hardware/network technologies this decade but there's an ever increasing push to centralize hosting with cloud providers. Will this ever swing the other way?

[acdha]

Look at what's driving the shift: data centers are a major capital investment up-front plus a significant amount of staffing to operate and secure them. If you have enough proven need to justify that, you can easily beat a cloud provider — especially if you can simplify the problem in some ways that a generic service cannot.

For most organizations, however, it's hard to justify investing millions of dollars up-front in the hope that at some point you'll be saving enough to make that pay off. If that's not your core business it's often easier and safer to outsource it so, for example, you don't end up with a data center full of 50% utilized hardware which you bought to have capacity for growth which wasn't quite what you expected — or a big crunch when you have more demand than capacity and now need to double that investment to handle [currently] 10% of your usage.

[znpy]

> For most organizations, however, it's hard to justify investing millions of dollars up-front in the hope that at some point you'll be saving enough to make that pay off.

Well if you have your bills and a prospect of how much building and operating a datacenter would be, it could be very easy to do the calculation.

Btw one should not dismiss so easily the work of datacenter companies. They often have very high security standards and practices.

And this means that you don't necessarily have to build a datacenter from the ground up. You can start saving by just renting one or two rack cabinets and start putting your own hardware in there.

[acdha]

Oh, I’m not being dismissive of their work - it’s just multiple lines of skilled work which you have to complete. The building, hardware, and software management all require 24x7 operations and security, work with vendors and capacity planning, etc. and overseeing all of that work.

At some level of usage those costs are lower than the savings but that line has been going up for years, especially for anyone who needs PCI, HIPAA, FEDRAMP, etc. where there’s a ready package available covering a lot of it.

[ape4]

Yeah especially if your company has more than one location - for redunancy