For large companies, a big reason is to transform capex into opex, and the predictability. Moreover, large organizations tend to favor predictivity over levels, i.e. are ok to increase average if variance is decreased.
This. The beginning of my career on cloud was a POC, where the director shared with me this was a major driving factor (capex > opex), as well as some of the fringe benefits.
I got to see close up that a team of devs ran their whole solution (with a bunch of paying customers and everything) in the cloud, because cloud automation was good enough that they didn't need dedicated ops people.
Now I work for a cloud provider. I can't say that if I was running a business that I'd build it cloud-first instead of OnPrem. Certain use cases, sure. If I didn't need a lot of horsepower, I might build it on a cluster of VM's with some segmentation of duties - not quite microservices, not quite a monolith. Most likely if I was hosting on the cloud, I'd use the provider I work for, just because I know the system and how to get things done and how to talk to support.
I will say though - learning the ins and outs of cloud computing has made for a great career. Challenging, but lucrative.
FTA:
> Microsoft and Google decided not to officially comment on the survey's findings. However, a representative for one of the hyperscalers retorted that the figures seemed cherry-picked and pointed out that, as an example, customers using reserved instances could realize significant savings.
Reserved instances are a thing for sure. There's lots of other ways you can control cloud spend (enterprise agreements, dev/test subscriptions, spot instances, automated shut down / scale down, etc.) - it's enough complexity by itself that big companies hire entire teams of people to just work on tracking, projecting and controlling cloud costs.
I got to see close up that a team of devs ran their whole solution (with a bunch of paying customers and everything) in the cloud, because cloud automation was good enough that they didn't need dedicated ops people.
Now I work for a cloud provider. I can't say that if I was running a business that I'd build it cloud-first instead of OnPrem. Certain use cases, sure. If I didn't need a lot of horsepower, I might build it on a cluster of VM's with some segmentation of duties - not quite microservices, not quite a monolith. Most likely if I was hosting on the cloud, I'd use the provider I work for, just because I know the system and how to get things done and how to talk to support.
I will say though - learning the ins and outs of cloud computing has made for a great career. Challenging, but lucrative.
FTA:
> Microsoft and Google decided not to officially comment on the survey's findings. However, a representative for one of the hyperscalers retorted that the figures seemed cherry-picked and pointed out that, as an example, customers using reserved instances could realize significant savings.
Reserved instances are a thing for sure. There's lots of other ways you can control cloud spend (enterprise agreements, dev/test subscriptions, spot instances, automated shut down / scale down, etc.) - it's enough complexity by itself that big companies hire entire teams of people to just work on tracking, projecting and controlling cloud costs.