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I'm not only talking about the cost of the cloud. Although, that turns out to be a big broken promise If you're renting compute from a major cloud provider, your spending significantly more than you may need More details here thenewstack.io/cloud-vs-on-...

All the Kubernetes shifting and "modernization" is also causing long term re-platforming with a lot of added complexity

True. When I worked for an MSP (of 19 years) we set up multiple environments for customers to leverage VMware; Private and Dedicated environments. However, once Azure and AWS started being tossed around, we had a number of customers decide to leave because "It was better."

So many companies are hoping a platform will save them from the complexity without realizing how difficult it is to build a platform and how impossible it is to build useful abstractions on top of a complex and constantly shifting base They're building illusions, not abstractions

I've been skeptical of Kubernetes for a long time for the same reasons, but recently I started reconsidering. Self-managed k8s is less of a pain than it was five years ago, and - if well thought - it can enable interesting levels of standardization/simplification.

Your first level, 600k year on cloud, and you have “teams” doing cost opt. Hint: that would be silly.

I agree. That’s not what I said

Iiiiiiiiif you can get and keep talent. And success disasters can’t happen. And you can weather outages. And you rock at cybersecurity. And capital is cheap. And you can predict needs in advance. And no innovation from three multi-trillion dollar multinationals could possibly help your business.

How did it work in the past if all those things are requirements?

Hot take!! 🔥 but a good one. Someone at the Startup fest today said “for new companies, using the cloud is table stakes” - thoughts? It’s nice how quickly you can move on ideas and buildings with the cloud

If you don't know what your revenue or needs are for at least a year you should use the cloud If you travel you should stay in a hotel. It's convenient even if it costs 20x per night as rent.

Out of interest, would you say this still stands up for smaller companies/startups OR companies without a team of people capable of operating servers. It's a skillset in itself operating infrastructure right? I agree with your points about complexity but I don't think salary of people is factored in

Just read the new stack article you linked, the point about the cost of a cloud centre of excellence is fair I hadn't fully considered. Id say the pool of people with that skill set is bigger though. Still interested to get your thoughts on companies looking to mo without infrastructure skills 🤔

The numbers in the article are general guidelines based on trends I’ve seen and companies I’ve worked at or with The thing I like about “ground computing” is “it depends” is a valid answer If you are small and can’t project your spend for a year or more then the cloud is a great option

It has totally lived up to the hype. It's one of the few tech advances that has in the last decade or so. Back to on prem is the new hype train, which for the vast majority of orgs, will not live up to the hype.