Conversely: I find that the inverse is true very often.

People are very quick to throw their current systems away in favour of the cloud due to a myriad of reasons; be it sticker shock, promise of less headcount, the idea that you can hire people easier or simply because of a Gartner report that your CTO happened to read on a flight.

This causes migrations to the cloud that kinda don’t make sense, they’re borne out of ideology or “not being left behind” and sometimes it fails catastrophically.

We would do well not to cargo cult, but reasonably deduce and argue what our objectives truly are.

I have been on many teams that could’ve easily been in maintenance mode and not changed anything for years. The business would’ve hummed along stably and profitably. But it’s hard to justify your job in IT if you say your roadmap is to just keep doing what you’re doing. Nevermind the people in between business and IT who really contribute to neither.

So we get these pendulum swings and huge projects (move everything to cloud, move everything back, make engineering do ops, make a dedicated ops team, micro segment everything, flat network everything) just so IT management can convince the business they’re providing some value.

Gartner is the “independent” third party that allows IT folks and tech vendors to convince the business they are doing the right thing.

And yeah I’m sure some of these pendulum swings have come at great cost to the business, even halting it entirely (SAP)

There’s going to be mountain of companies going out of business in 5 years due to following Gartner’s low/no code advice.

I was big cloud enjoyer in like 2016-20 but then some hacker news post open my eyes to the truth. They are trying to milk everyone and hook every possible person on some free credits then bump prices and get fat profits and ofc make as hard as possible getting out of the platform.

I just don't care and move to smaller providers for VPS and database + cloudflare for dns and pseudo s3 (still in almost free tier).

The only places I’ve seen it work are:

- massive seasonal demand with negligible usage during off-season (think TurboTax if it weren’t part of Intuit)

- brand new product development where you don’t even know what you need yet or you are going through exponential growth that you can’t get ahead of. (This stage should only last like 6 months though)

I was hoping those lessons would be a bit more common by now.

But nowadays, it runs full load 24/7 on the cloud.

Turns out the after hours batch jobs are just as demanding. shrugs

It’s just a super lazy take from someone who likes to use serverless because he doesn’t like to maintain things. It’s essentially an argument to live in a hotel because they can do maintenance at scale better than you.

And with his maps he’ll have analysed things quite effectively

I might disagree with him on the EU but his technology analysis is usually bang on

No shit, taking advice from a car salesman on how often to buy cars and what cars to buy is about the dumbest thing you can do.

His entire livelihood and career was built on selling this story that you need to pay others to run all of your infrastructure for you. He’s shilling IT illiteracy rather than pushing for more sustainable on-prem solutions.

Most on-prem solutions I've seen aren't sustainable, massive Capex costs, teams of people that could be better used in other ways just to keep trivial things applications running

I've worked all sorts of cloud environments for about ten years now, and with metal servers before that, and I'm not all that convinced that the cloud is saving all that much in terms of engineering effort. Or if it does, I haven't experienced it.

Sure, no one gets woken up at 4AM because your server's disks are failing, but instead you get woken up at 4AM because all your cloud native infrastructure is doing $funky_stuff. And yeah, no need to install and maintain servers any more, but now you need to write a whole bunch of code to interface with all the cloud stuff and maintain that. Lots of open positions for k8s engineers "dev-ops" engineers to make all of that work.

I run my stuff on Linode VPS's, which is "the cloud" as in "renting servers", but it's not "the cloud" as in all the "cloud native" stuff we have now. My experience is that sometimes the cloud makes things easy, and it makes things harder. On balance, it seems we just swapped one set of problems for another set of problems, and we haven't really gained all that much in the end.

I don't think Hey is running a "niche edge case"; it seems fairly standard stuff to me. That Tweet comes off as quite dismissive.

Have you considered that sometimes (really, almost all the time) people run code that is more than 2 years old? Have you considered the costs of things like serverless when you have a reasonably constant load?

I am a huge fan of cloud as a platform for time-shared server rentals. Cloud for "value added" products like serverless and whatever new database they cook up starts to get really funky and weird, in addition to being extremely expensive.

He doesn't see it as a fad to use the cloud and serverless, but as the natural way of things, like you don't build your own power plant or highway.

I don't really like using analogies for this sort of thing as I think it muddles things more than it clarifies, and quickly leads to discussions about the analogy rather than the topic at hand, but if we must use one I'd say it's more analogous to a business deciding to purchase a company van or lorry. For a lot of businesses, this clearly isn't needed and renting one when you do is fine, but at some point it just becomes easier and more cost-effective to have your own (depending on what you do with it, nature of your business, etc.) in spite of the extra hassle of having to maintain, clean, etc. your vehicles.

We're just disagreeing when that point is reached.

In fact, there are very few companies over a certain size that haven't built a road. This kind of overhead is generally expected once you have scale, because the alternatives are far more expensive. Datacenters are similar.

If you're one of them, go get your datacenter.

By the same analogy, tech companies should not run from building server racks and/or datacenters. It may not be your company's core competency, but it should be one of your competencies to understand how to run a computer. It really doesn't take that much work to run 10 computers.

You nailed it on the head. The problems have just moved from one camp to another. We make our life easier because we can talk to an API to get our network, compute, and storage but the complexity in doing so has a pretty high price as well. The current devops trends are mindbogglingly complex compared to most of software that is getting deployed with them.

That is the crux right there. And some people need one set of problems fix (so do the cloud) and some need a different set (so do on prem).

I very much prefer on-prem, but for some sets of problems, the cloud does make sense.

Talk about broad, sweeping statements. Care to substantiate?

To use cloud efficiently you have to build for it. Startups are much more efficient in that regard in comparison to monolithic applications running on premise.

Or if you’re a really small company - sure. You should probably rely on SaaS mainly.

I would say many companies fall outside of these categories though and could potentially both save money and gain performance staying on-prem.

I know my current employer does, and we’re seriously looking at moving back to on-prem/co-lo.

My sentiment leans toward host your own for a number of reasons, but it's challenging to make good decisions. Can you trust the person who is telling you that you can do it? Their org chart goes away if they lose this argument, so of course you're going to hear from them how we can do this.

If the team you have has been doing a decent job, maybe you should listen to them. If they've been doing a poor job, then you have to ask why they're suddenly going to be able to provide a level of service you haven't been enjoying for years. My company went through one of these fishtails. I think everybody is happier that we ended up in the cloud, even those of us who will only begrudgingly admit it. As I said in another thread, I think the Hype Cycle for The Cloud will at least give some orgs with a dysfunctional IT department an opportunity to clean house and then start over in a couple of years as informed consumers. Or find a new kind of service provider that distances itself from The Cloud salespitch.