I suspect you’re doing it wrong, or there’s some niche type of computing you specialize in.
In general purpose IT, looking across an enterprise portfolio of applications, we consistently see customers of Tidal Migrations replatform their applications to cloud and save 95+% in OpEx vs dedicated on-premise hosting.
IMO, The first step to realizing those cost benefits is recognizing that the cloud is not your datacenter and you need to architect differently.
Yes, cloud spend can grow as you open up access to more developers, but that’s why we have a plethora of tools and governance people to help make that manageable. I believe the business benefit of the agility gains that come from instant and decentralized resource provisioning will always trump any cloud bill... especially if you’re in a competitive industry & don’t want to get left behind.
> IMO, The first step to realizing those cost benefits is recognizing that the cloud is not your datacenter and you need to architect differently.
I see you've never setup or had to deal with setting up SAP. There are a ton of legacy line of business applications which, won't be close to "cloud" any time in the near future. And are all run on if you're lucky, vm clusters, if you're unlucky on bare iron due to silly crap like per cpu licensing on where it "might" be run. Or if virtualized, a sum of all the physical hardware cpu's.
"Enterprise" software running on premises is... problematic at best. Good luck replatforming something like this. They ask for your arm, leg, first unborn child, and your great grandkids children for the opportunity to run their software.
I'm avoiding talking about the vendors that require up to or over a month to have a contractor on site helping you "integrate and install" their application on your systems. That crap is so far removed from instant and decentralized resource provisioning its like being in another universe. God help you if you need to change anything.
Parent is probably comparing the cost of on prem to running VMs 24x7. Most IT departments are running software they did not write and don’t have the luxury of even getting access to the source code. If these customers want to do cloud they have to do it ‘wrong’
I did not say on-premise for a reason. Most people are not well placed to host on-premise. For starters it tends to require ops staff on site, which in many countries means a minimum of 3 shifts of a minimum of 2 people. On-premise deployments rarely makes sense.
I said dedicated hosting, which implies renting servers from providers like e.g. Hetzner.
But that said, you can replatform to anything from anything and save money in most organizations, because most organizations tends to be very bad at optimizing cost, so this to me says very little.
Most of the systems I've moved over the years were on the other hand carefully architected to be "cloud friendly" to start with. Some of them started out on cloud platforms and were migrated off to save money.
When you on the other hand start comparing the amount of compute and bandwidth you can get for the same prices, it becomes very clear how overpriced they are.
You can easily find bandwidth at less than 1/10th the price of AWS for example, and in fact I've had clients where their bandwidth bill alone at AWS was bigger than the total hosting bill after I'd moved them elsewhere. No amount of architectural change of their systems will change that - at a minimum you need to reduce the data transfer from their AWS setup. Now, you don't need to move everything out of AWS to fix that - often the savings you can achieve by cutting the AWS bandwidth bill can pay for an entire CDN....
Dedicated hosting also tends to give you far more flexibility in the precise hardware configuration to the point where savings can be similarly huge by substantially reducing the number of instances.
> I believe the business benefit of the agility gains that come from instant and decentralized resource provisioning will always trump any cloud bill...
Nothing prevents you from spinning up cloud instances when needed. Most dedicated hosting providers today also offers cloud instances, so you can typically do that even with a single provider. In practice, the cost difference between dedicated and cloud typically allows a substantial overprovisioning and still saving money, but if you're prepared to use cloud to handle spikes, you can save even more by using dedicated by going closer to the wire, because you know you can spin up cloud instances to take the peaks.
I've set up and operated systems like that which balanced loads over both colo's, dedicated hosting and cloud instances seamlessly several times.
In general purpose IT, looking across an enterprise portfolio of applications, we consistently see customers of Tidal Migrations replatform their applications to cloud and save 95+% in OpEx vs dedicated on-premise hosting.
IMO, The first step to realizing those cost benefits is recognizing that the cloud is not your datacenter and you need to architect differently.
Yes, cloud spend can grow as you open up access to more developers, but that’s why we have a plethora of tools and governance people to help make that manageable. I believe the business benefit of the agility gains that come from instant and decentralized resource provisioning will always trump any cloud bill... especially if you’re in a competitive industry & don’t want to get left behind.