[abu_ameena]

I see it as a long-term tradeoff on user freedom. You pay upfront for a capable hardware, you get your services running locally (you don’t pay subscriptions). Or you buy cheap hardware, you still need the same services “running in some cloud” for $X monthly. X goes up depending on the corporate bottom-line

[raw_anon_1111]

In the history of cloud computing, prices have mostly only come down especially as inference becomes a commodity. Realistically, just looking at Mac prices, the cost of a computer with decent local inference would be around $6000 per person.

The world is not moving back to on prem.

[Aurornis]

> Realistically, just looking at Mac prices, the cost of a computer with decent local inference would be around $6000 per person.

As someone who has hardware in that price range and plays with local LLMs: The gap between Opus or GPT and the local models is still very large for work beyond simple queries.

Self-hosted also starts making my office hot due to all of the power consumption when I use it for anything more than short queries. If you haven't heard your Mac's fans spin up much yet, running local LLMs will get you acquainted with the sound of their cooling systems at full blast.

[esseph]

> The world is not moving back to on prem.

Lol, you should tell my customers (that are moving back on prem) that!

You should also tell Microsoft, who just yesterday said they are going back to focusing on local apps.

[raw_anon_1111]

Your customers are an anecdote, now compare that to the publicly reported numbers from AWS, GCP and Azure where they all say the only thing keeping them from growing more is the chip shortage.

[esseph]

Oh I'm sure they'll continue to have some cloud services, no doubt. But look at VMware for example, even after the insane price increases. Nutanix also seems to be doing quite well. I'm seeing a fair amount of on-prem bare metal k8s too.

[raw_anon_1111]

Again - anecdotes is not data. We have data. That would be about as silly as me citing my own experience as proof that “everyone is moving to AWS” when I work for a company that is exclusively an AWS partner consulting company.

[esseph]

> Again - anecdotes is not data. We have data.

You have data showing growth in cloud, which I expect and don't disagree with. The data I come across shows this too!

What I disagree with, from my own experiences and all the data I can seem to find online is that the growth rate in repatriation is MUCH higher than the growth in cloud.

It has flipped over the last 3yr.

US Enterprises, Fortune 100, especially. Also a lot of public entities (gov).

"In 2025, repatriation is still generally an upward trend. Data from the end of 2024 showed that 86% of CIOs planned to move some public cloud workloads back to private cloud or on-premises — the highest on record for the Barclays CIO Survey."

"Real examples of cloud repatriation include Dropbox, Adobe, and GEICO. All three companies moved a significant portion of their infrastructure onto public cloud before moving it to a combination of on-premises and hybrid cloud providers."

Noted: SaaS accounts for 46.10% of market revenue, while PaaS is the fastest-growing segment at 21.35% CAGR