[hibikir]

The best advantage of cloud was never price: It was not having to argue with your data center organization, which often lead to taking months to provision anything, even a very boring VM. If those companies were good at managing data centers, and could hire people actually interested in helping the company run, they'd have had little need for the cloud in predictable compute loads.

Until you get quite big, all necessary interactions with the cloud provider are just bills. It's just much easier, even though it is often expensive

[silverquiet]

Cloud was absolutely sold as saving money once upon a time, but like any other industry, they wanted to push the margins higher by getting away from providing commodity services (cloud primitives in their case), and thus the marketing started saying it was never about saving money or how you're not supposed to use the primitives; you need to use the higher-level, managed services (that also happen to have tons of vendor lock-in).

I've spent the last decade or so wondering if the emperor was wearing clothes and not really getting what everyone else has been talking about. Which isn't to say that cloud is useless, but it's not the universal panacea that it was often sold as, and it seems that others are waking up to that.

[jermaustin1]

The other advantage was for moving off-prem. Cap-Ex vs Op-Ex. That was the reason one of my past employers switched.

Another past employer switched because we hit our scale up limit, and needed to start scaling out. A small refactor allowed us to scale out, and we moved to azure's managed database, queue, and blob storage. The web frontend could scale based on connections, and the queue and blob storage was slower than our current approach, but it was better once we added the autoscaling. Since the slower speed was PER connection. Minimum scale was 5 instances, so that there was no bottleneck when scaling.

There are many reasons to go "cloud" but for most small businesses (or at least small departments of large organizations), cloud-first doesn't seem like a great option unless you have 10s of thousands in credits each month. Just build your software, scale up first on-prem or at a datacenter - it is LOADs cheaper and predictable.

[BobbyTables2]

The last part really resonates with me. Ironically, the small businesses always seem to start first in the cloud.

Always felt I was too stupid to see what everyone is so excited about.

[jermaustin1]

Based on the lack of upvotes on the comment, I guess I'm also too stupid to understand why "cloud" is better than "not cloud".

[vb-8448]

> which often lead to taking months to provision anything, even a very boring VM

It's still true? In my experience it used to be, nowadays most of the organizations have an internal serf-provisioning portal.

[dartos]

Who do you think builds and maintains those portals?

Internal data center organizations that need to be argued with to acquire quota. They usually don’t care for internal or dev stuff, but as soon as something needs prod levels of quota or new licenses, prepare to wait.

[michpoch]

> organizations have an internal serf-provisioning portal

Which will create things in cloud…