[steveBK123]

Long term rug pull on CTOs who thought the cloud would somehow be better, easier & cheaper.

CTOs get lots of free credits, downsize their infra staffing.

Start using the basic building blocks, but then of the basic building blocks (servers & storage) are marked up and expensive.

Next, to find cost savings their org need to move deeper and deeper into alphabet soup of cloud vendor proprietary stack, at which point they are locked in.

[api]

They’re even more locked into cloud now than it seems because not only have they shut down their in house ops but they’ve lost the skills and the work force.

Now SaaS and cloud is free to squeeze as hard as they want. The lock in is strong.

Saw this coming miles away. Nobody listened of course. This industry worships fads. When the buzz becomes “everyone is doing X” it becomes truly hard not to do it too. All your bosses, employees, investors, etc push for it.

You’re not going all cloud? What are you? Old?

[steveBK123]

Right, and a lot of the cloud naive make lofty positive assumptions that aren't true.

For example, you can't lose data in the cloud. There are very much operational mistakes you can make with combinations of S3 settings around versioning and deletes, that result in permanent irretrievable dataloss.

My last shop managed to do this and then was implementing some sort of cloud data backup scheme.. in the cloud, lol.

The other assumption is that sure compute is costly, but since you can spin it up&down you'll save so much. As it turns out, most apps, most of the time, do not have bursty use cases that merit paying 2-3x for compute in hopes of spinning it down when idle. The funny thing is the same people selling this line are also the ones telling you to negotiate savings with some of those annual agreements that require a minimum amount of compute/spend.

The last one is assumptions about hockey stick compute growth needs, and that of course choosing AWS will make this easier than having to constantly procure servers. Maybe! But few have hockey stick compute growth needs for long. And it's not that impossible to trade your servers out every 18 months to get your compute density growth. And you aren't always guaranteed AWS compute at prices you want, as we've seen shortages of certain classes compute and needs to reserve up front, etc.

[SoftTalker]

> They’re even more locked into cloud now than it seems because not only have they shut down their in house ops but they’ve lost the skills and the work force.

On the other hand now they are free to concentrate their labor on their core business and competencies. Why on earth would they want to tie up payroll and benefits on people running the company email?

[hjhffyuu57]

It's a fair point, but here's a counter.

Large software companies still hire their own accountants and lawyers and HR correct? And this is largely expected and understood to be a requirement. Why should IT be any different?

Once you hit a certain size, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to say something like "let's outsource our IT, they are distracting me from focusing on our core competencies". You should have a CIO/CTO and a whole bunch of other people to be distracted for you. In fact, that's kind of the purpose of having an IT department, so that you can focus on your core competencies rather than keeping up to speed on the latest changes to AWS services or whatever.

This is weighted of course. The more your industry requires competent IT, the larger a % your company should probably be handling in house because then it is a part of what should be considered your core competencies if you want to stay around for very long.

[steveBK123]

And related - the further you decide to let things that "aren't your core competency" be outsourced, the less competence you retain to understand who the good vendor is to outsource to & manage their performance.

[farco12]

And that's about the time they jump ship and make those repercussions someone else's problem. I'm sure those vendor kickbacks were nice.

[dilyevsky]

Literally no one could see this coming…

[theropost]

Cloud is the greatest thing ever; for big tech companies.

[lowbloodsugar]

They aren’t talking an out PaaS like Azure or AWS. They are talking about things like Salesforce and Google Workplace.

[oriettaxx]

exactly