“But you have to pay for expensive technical experts to run your own computers, you don’t with AWS/Azure.”
That’s the usual comeback from the cloud true believers.
The essential message that AWS wants you to believe “Your company doesn’t have the skills to run computers, and you need no technical experts at all to use AWS”.
The cloud is where Moores Law goes to die - insanely expensive slow computers.
I told our VP of engineering the other day that the problem they're having is putting everything into locked-in/managed services when you should be owning your product.
The service I built has 99.99% availability, most of that was achieved by putting it in K8S clusters in multiple regions behind a CDN. Only managed service I rely on is SQL with better guaranteed uptime than I have (also way cheaper than doing it ourselves).
Aside from SQL, I can lift-and-shift almost all of our services at a moments notice. The only problem would be slightly degraded database query time, but we do a lot of caching in the clusters.
the -> cloud -> datacenter -> cloud -> datacenter move will by cyclical every few years.
companies that were in the cloud in 2018, did not have to pay the high costs of fixing hardware that was vulnerable to spectre/meltdown. in some cases, migrating from a datacenter to the cloud was cheaper than upgrading datacenters full of vulnerable hardware.
now with everyone in the cloud, datacenters have lower prices - so its going to draw companies into datacenters. in a few years, though, theyll have to either upgrade their hardware, or move back to the cloud. its gonna cycle like this for the forseeable future.