back to article Admins wonder if the cloud was such a good idea after all

After an initial euphoric rush to the cloud, administrators are questioning the value and promise of the tech giants' services. According to a report published by UK cloud outfit Civo, more than a third of organizations surveyed reckoned that their move to the cloud had failed to live up to promises of cost-effectiveness. Over …

  1. elsergiovolador Silver badge

    Shareholder

    The point of cloud is to be its shareholder, not its product.

    1. TReko Silver badge

      Re: Shareholder

      Yes, it was cheap at the start to get people locked in.

      From Microsoft's last results: cloud now brings in 4x what Windows does ($105B vs $23B).

    2. hoola Silver badge

      Re: Shareholder

      The wider issue now is that many organisations have reduced their datacentre footprint or in some cases got rid of them completely so it is not just a case of bring stuff back on-prrem.

      Then you have all the costs of retrieving the data on top of the hardware & staffing costs. Finance like cloud because they see a recurrent cost, not large capital bumps. Leasing of hardware worked around this but the cloud fantasy was already well underway by then.

      The shortcomings are only now becoming apparent with many of the limitations that simply did not exist on-prem

      Here are some examples

      Azure File - No VSS

      Azure SQL - Full export backup, no diff or transaction logs

      AWS DBs - Snapshot/export backups

      S3 bucket - no change tracking so you have to scan the entire bucket every time (compare that to Lustre where you can use the built in tracking DB)

      Egress costs

      Data ownership

      Data residency (There was a recent article where Microsoft could not actually guarantee that region was honoured when the UK Government asked)

      1. elsergiovolador Silver badge

        Re: Shareholder

        With my napkin maths at some workplaces, they could easily do on-prem, pay for full time staff to babysit the machines for fraction of the cost (though not small fraction)

        But shareholders and the board would reject these ideas, because of fear ("you don't have experience", "what if you get sudden spike of traffic, how do you scale up?", "AWS is a standard", "We don't mind extra cost, look at savings in hiring.")

        I worked at a place with on prem hosting and we had classic "cleaner unplugged the server" case at least once or people who installed the servers didn't label them. Fun finding which one that crashed needs to be hard rebooted.

        1. MachDiamond Silver badge

          Re: Shareholder

          "With my napkin maths at some workplaces, they could easily do on-prem, pay for full time staff to babysit the machines for fraction of the cost (though not small fraction)"

          There's the easily identifiable hard costs and then there's the harder to quantify costs. I still see some small business people (sole traders, etc) singing the praises of using an online accounting system but they fail to think about the "what-ifs". If the network is down on either end, the service is unavailable for maintenance, features are deleted/interface changes or the company just folds up. As a small customer, the chances of getting any answers to what might be going on is nigh on zero. At least with on-premises, it can be possible to throw money at the problem to get it resolved. If I can't generate an invoice, I'm not getting paid. If I can't get tax filings done on time, I'm getting fined. There's also the issue of putting your finances on-line as we all see how often databases are breached. I've never had any need to access my accounting system while in the field. Nobody has ever been put off by me telling them I'd need to send them something later once I was back in the office.

          For larger companies with several people interacting with the accounting system at the same time, there's plenty of software packages that allow for that and can even restrict access based on the user in conjunction with how they are logging in (local/remote). An outside sales person can enter sales and look up customer information, but only at human speeds. They wouldn't be allowed to generate comprehensive reports or pull down the whole customer list in one go.

          There's also the problem of a company business plan that is so tenuous where they outsource just about everything that should scream "not viable". I've interviewed at a couple of those and they also want to see 50hours/week as standard attendance for the same pay as a similar company that has a 40 hour/week guideline.

    3. steviesteveo

      Re: Shareholder

      "However, the rapid rise in the cost of electricity post-pandemic, coupled with the rising cost of skilled IT staff, put cloud delivery under new cost pressures *that had to be passed on*, from hyperscalers to platform provider, from platform provider to software provider, and finally from software providers to clients."

      That Gartner quotes absolutely nails why this is now wobbling - AWS etc just couldn't possibly absorb any increased costs whatsoever

  2. BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

    It's not really a cloud specific issue

    Sure, there are electricity price issues but that's unavoidable whatever option you choose. The real issue as ever is vendor lock in. If you're tied to AWS APIs it's difficult to move, and they can charge whatever they want. Make your product vendor API agnostic, or use your own set of hosted servers or expandable instances.

    It's often also a case of convenience, if you're not doing the end work, someone else is and will be charging you appropriately for it. What's the trade off for the customers using these systems?

    1. Dr Who

      Re: It's not really a cloud specific issue

      Couldn't agree more. Subscribing to the proprietary features of one of the cloud platforms can let you build a lot of functionality very quickly, but the vendor then has you well and truly over a barrel. It also takes disaster recovery completely out of your control. We run our cloud infrastructure across multiple cloud vendors and have designed it in such a way that failing over from one cloud to another is straight forward (proved by both testing and recovery from actual failures).

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: It's not really a cloud specific issue

        We're locked in as despite my ignored protests we're using all Microsoft 365 proprietary, cloud specific apps for reporting etc.

        1. ecofeco Silver badge

          Re: It's not really a cloud specific issue

          God help them.

    2. Jedit Silver badge
      WTF?

      "The real issue as ever is vendor lock in."

      I have never, ever understood why a company would want to turn over all its data to an external partner for the sake of a small convenience. It's a reverse economy of scale; the more data you have, the better off you are storing it on-site and the more justifiable maintenance of your own data centre becomes. But at the other end of the scale, if you only have a small amount of data to store then storing it locally becomes much easier.

      Perhaps there's a Goldilocks zone where you can't centrally store your own data economically. But that isn't how it's ever pushed, of course. Cloud storage is the WaVe Of ThE fUtUrE and apparently everyone should be doing it - leaving themselves vulnerable through audience captivity.

      1. BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

        Re: "The real issue as ever is vendor lock in."

        As 'Dr Who' says proprietary features can let you build functionality quickly. Time is money and a possible business advantage. Same thing as using a commercial third party library in a desktop application.

        The question is then if it comes with increased costs due to vendor lock in, a lack of control due to someone else creating the product, and potentially building up technical debt for the future.

        It's not necessarily a poor decision if it results in overall increased revenue and/or less man hours required.

        I'm not sure about small amounts of data - if you want to make it resilient there's a certain upfront cost regardless of data size that may make it cheaper to use a third party provider.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: "The real issue as ever is vendor lock in."

        "I have never, ever understood why a company would want to turn over all its data to an external partner for the sake of a small convenience."

        In our case its because a clueless fuckwhit is in charge who has no IT knowledge or skills. Got where he is by grifting. Because the people above him are equally clueless it works.

        1. Jamie Jones Silver badge

          Re: "The real issue as ever is vendor lock in."

          Overpaid and clueless, and too self-important to seek the advice of his tech workers.

          The universal truth.

          And said fuckwit will have shuffled jobs at least 5 times before the shit hits the fan.

          1. Guy de Loimbard Bronze badge

            Re: "The real issue as ever is vendor lock in."

            Not long left an organisation with a brace of the "said fuckwits" all pandering to the CTO about their amazing plan to move all on prem to the cloud, including all the shit that doesn't work properly on prem, as if the cloud will fix it during transit....

            Sat back and looked at the useless fuckwits blagging their way through a multi year transfer program that's over budget and behind schedule.... why?? Because it's "Cloud"

            Snake oil for some companies I think.

      3. ShameElevator

        Re: "The real issue as ever is vendor lock in."

        It depends on the business. We were a 15 person shop doing IT consulting services, development and an in house SaaS solution. Not having to maintain a physical infrastructure and internal network (ADDS, mail, backup and so on) made it possible to free up 1-2 persons that then could be sold to customers instead. Also gave us a much more stable infrastructure and much more freedom in where we had our office as we didn’t have to think in a server room with all that entails. I know it could be hosted another place but that adds in the 1-2 persons time again. When we moved everything to the cloud and turned off the server room, 95% of our power bill vanished.

        Is it perfect? No. Is it saving a lot of money? Probably not. Can we focus on the more fun things? Yes!

        1. BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

          Re: "The real issue as ever is vendor lock in."

          Absolutely, as I noted above it's a trade off and a business decision. Vendor lock in is 'OK' for as long as you extract more or the same amount of money and resource that you pay, and can exit in a moderately timely manner[1]. If it saves on 1-2 person's time that's a lot of money saved.

          I'm not sure I'd count e-mail as vendor lock in quite the same way as some of the cloud web platforms, but I'd hesitate to locally host it these days. Work use Microsoft hosted Exchange, and aside from a few password synchronising issues in the early days, I'd say now it's incredibly solid to the point it doesn't even feel like SaaS. On a personal basis, the price to host a moderate amount of IMAP mail is low enough that I don't see dealing with e-mail server hassle at the end of broadband as worthwhile.

          [1] For work there is no standard interface for extracting all hosted data, for instance. On exit a customer will pay handsomely for data outside certain standard extracts. This (mostly) isn't price gouging as developing a method of easily letting a customer leave is not a priority. Get it written into the contract that all data will be extracted and what format it will be provided in. Contracts are inept enough they may agree anyway, and it'll end up costing us a notable number of person hours. I have zero guilt about this - it pays part of my wages, and if business don't do their diligence on implementation costs customers will definitely not be nice and provide more money, so we shouldn't be nice to them when they don't follow very clearly written contract terms, and are leaving as a customer anyway.

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: "The real issue as ever is vendor lock in."

          That last bit is a issue I have. I got told "Well we can put this down as a good environment move can't we? Because we'll be saving so much more on power." I said yes but its disengenuous. You're going to claim we're saving the planet but we're not, we're just giving the power issue to Microsoft.

          I was told "Yeah, doesn't matter, at least we can say its a 3rd parties problem"

          So they actually give no shits, despite that being the job of the department. Just so long as we can claim we're not the ones creating that power drain.

        3. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: "The real issue as ever is vendor lock in."

          Can we focus on the more fun things?

          Indeed ...

          Like (for example) how you will manage/feel when your cloud vendor screws you over.

          Repeatedly.

          .

        4. Jedit Silver badge
          Unhappy

          "1-2 persons that then could be sold to customers"

          ... I think I know what you mean, but that isn't how I would word it.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: "1-2 persons that then could be sold to customers"

            That cotton isn't going to pick itself.

        5. TotallyInfo

          Re: "The real issue as ever is vendor lock in."

          And vendor lock-in is not just a cloud problem.

          It is fun for The Reg to mock cloud moves but out in the real world life is not so simple.

          On premise datacentres also get vendor lock-in. Whether that is the networking, the compute hardware/software, even the DC itself with its HVAC and location.

          I seem to have to keep repeating the mantra that "there is no such thing as a magic bullet"! They don't exist and they never have. This applies as much to the move to cloud as it does to AI.

          The other thing that is overlooked in the post is that the cost pressures of staff and electricity apply every bit as much - probably more so - to on-premise approaches as they do at scale to global cloud vendors. Costs have gone up for EVERYTHING, not just for cloud.

      4. hoola Silver badge

        Re: "The real issue as ever is vendor lock in."

        It is called CFO......

        Cloud is sold to C-Suite, not techies.

        Those on the technical side that are pro-cloud are either young or developers who have no concept of anything other than their bit of code. That includes security!

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: "The real issue as ever is vendor lock in."

          It is called CFO...

          CFO?

          Hmmm ...

          Must be a fancy new acronym for those abortions of nature I have always heard being referred to as 'beancounters'.

          Along with the marketing droids, the scourge of any IT outfit, big or small.

          Vade retro !

          .

      5. StrangerHereMyself Silver badge

        Re: "The real issue as ever is vendor lock in."

        The biggest advantage of Cloud is in my opinion redundancy. You can mirror you database to another region in another country or even another continent. For example, if the floodgates near London fail it will be nice to know your data is still accessible from the Liverpool DC.

        If the UK gets embroiled in an nuclear war it's nice to know your company can still access its data from the Seattle DC.

        That's the only advantage I see for regular companies. For startups the ability to quickly scale may be invaluable but that's only a small part of the demographics.

        1. Tron Silver badge

          Re: "The real issue as ever is vendor lock in."

          quote: You can mirror you database to another region in another country or even another continent.

          Not for much longer. Nationalist dicks in government are very big on sovereign data. To the point where it may be the next big thing/moral panic.

          I wonder if laziness plays a part. Pre-cloud, storage was managed to save cost. You stored the bare minimum and archived the rest. Have people become lazy, just storing everything because they can, and because they are not footing the bill?

          It is always a bad idea to make your business dependent upon the pricing whims of another, and the Cloud has been marketed like a street corner dealer markets a drug.

          And 1Tb drives cost less than £50.

          1. doublelayer Silver badge

            Re: "The real issue as ever is vendor lock in."

            Sovereign data doesn't have to stop you. If your country is large enough, you can probably store your data in different parts. For the big cloud providers in the UK, that's usually London and Cardiff. It also tends to apply to only certain industries or types of data, and the rest can store in Dublin or Amsterdam as they please.

            "Pre-cloud, storage was managed to save cost. You stored the bare minimum and archived the rest. Have people become lazy, just storing everything because they can, and because they are not footing the bill?"

            Yes, they are lazy, and they are footing the bill. Often more with cloud storage than without it when you grow large enough. That wouldn't change if running on prem. Managing data to figure out what you need now, what you'll need soon, what you'll need in a basement just in case, and what you can throw out is hard and expensive. A while ago, it was expensive in employees, but the employees were somewhat cheap and the space to store the paper was the limiting factor, so lots of people were hired to move it. Now, employees are a lot more expensive, the amount of data they have to consider has grown, and disks are much cheaper. So they just keep storing it.

            By the way, the "1Tb drives cost less than £50" factor is related to why a lot of people use cloud storage after all. The drives are quite cheap, so if you want to archive some data offline, they can make a part of the solution. Running those drives costs more, and I'm not talking about electricity. I'm talking about drive bays to hold all of those as hot storage and the servers those bays are connected to just to store and retrieve data on them. If you have lots of data that you want to be available whenever someone who may not be in the same building wants, you'll be spending a lot more per drive to do that. You'll also need lots more storage for redundancy because those cheap hard drives break. There is an area somewhere between "That server holds big drives in RAID where we store all our data" and "We store so many petabytes that we have a team who design and build custom servers for massive storage needs" where finding someone else who does the latter and paying them to store the data starts to make more sense.

          2. Oneman2Many Bronze badge

            Re: "The real issue as ever is vendor lock in."

            Enterprise drives are not £50 a TB., You also need to put them in something and manage it and back it up.

            The real killer for cloud storage is data transfer charges, not the cost of storage.

          3. MachDiamond Silver badge

            Re: "The real issue as ever is vendor lock in."

            "I wonder if laziness plays a part. Pre-cloud, storage was managed to save cost. You stored the bare minimum and archived the rest. Have people become lazy, just storing everything because they can, and because they are not footing the bill?"

            It's gone beyond that since the Cloud companies have flooded the market with all sorts of "features". The programmers need to be working on something since they are still needed to have around. This leads to companies subscribing to those features to "better analyze" their businesses. It's more like "over-analyze" the business since the toys are a lot of fun and interesting insights are great if one ignores that they don't translate to better operations as much as that manpower and money being spent improving the product/service.

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: "The real issue as ever is vendor lock in."

          But it doesn't work like that. You'd think it does but it doesn't. If you do want that redundancy, you have to pay a lot of money for it and most companies don't because they are moving to the cloud as they are sold the lie that it will be cheaper and sold the lie about redundancy (which maybe possible but you have to pay a shit tone for that). You have to use Multi-Geo Capabilities for 365 and getting pricing on it seems impossible. And there is a minimum number of users required so most small business' can't have it.

    3. Adair Silver badge

      Re: It's not really a cloud specific issue

      Not so much a matter of ROI as RAL—'Repent At Leisure'.

    4. MachDiamond Silver badge

      Re: It's not really a cloud specific issue

      "Make your product vendor API agnostic, or use your own set of hosted servers or expandable instances."

      I have to explain this to some of my clients when they set up websites with places such as Go Daddy and Square. Sure, the templates are nice and quick, but they aren't portable. The next year when the contract comes up for renewal, it can be 3x the price. Some hosts are also known for offering packages that let them own the domain name so you could pick up and move, but you'd leave behind "your" domain name and all of the work done to date getting the web site just so. I try to convince them that basing their web site on Wordpress, Drupal or some other content creation/management package that's host agnostic means they can pick up and leave anytime they like. They should also have their domain name themselves and use a separate registrar so they can't be held hostage.

      Technically, I could set up my own hosting from home, but it would be a pain and there are numbers of hosts to choose from. I have picked up and changed providers in an afternoon with almost no downtime. Since I have a good back up system, it would be cheap to have somebody do it for me if I didn't have the time to do it myself. Having spent some years in aerospace as a safety officer as part of my duties, I'm always thinking about "what-ifs". What if my host goes out of business without notice? What if my host triples their prices? As a sole trader, I can weather a lot before I'm seriously impacted, but a large company that's outsourced critical pieces of their workflow to a much larger outside company can take a massive hit for that technology to be out for a few hours or a couple of days. A former girlfriend (a few decades ago) that worked at GM told me that an assembly line going down cost the company a minimum of $125,000/hour. The risk to outsource machine control, part sequencing, etc is too high to have it done out of house where step one is the difficulty in getting somebody on the phone to find out what's going on. I'd not be surprised if the down-time cost is closer to 1/2mn/hour now. I don't even want to calculate home much money has gone down the drain in the time it takes to hear "All of our representatives are currently helping other clients. Your call is very important to use so please stay on the line for the next available customer service representative". (Click, brrrrrrrrrrrr. Or "battery critically low")

  3. Dan 55 Silver badge

    "CIOs cannot turn their back on cloud."

    Well there you go then. The Man from Gartner he says no, and when has he ever been wrong before?

    1. dinsdale54

      Re: "CIOs cannot turn their back on cloud."

      Gartner generally aren't wrong because they ask their customers what they plan on doing, then write a report saying 'this is what everybody wil be doing'

      The people they interviewed then have an 'independent' report to support doing exactly what they were already planning on doing.

      Nice work if you can get it.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: "CIOs cannot turn their back on cloud."

        Those who can’t do, teach.

        Those who can’t teach, do ‘business research’.

  4. EricM

    Short lived memories, maybe?

    Maybe one effect might be that people tend to forget negative exeperiences from the past?

    On-premise datacenters with limited capacity were resized in a matter of 10? years, if at all.

    Often you were limited by available space, power, CAPEX and projects were sized to fit in whatever limited capacity was available.

    Remeber the resulting amount of pretty expensive work spent on code optimizations in earlier days?

    Now that all developers/admins have practically unlimited capacity at their fingertips, Optimization IMHO does seem to get much less attention nowadays.

    So I find it unsurprising that cloud bills go up over time, however, lower manpower cost should balance rising cloud costs to a certain extent for many organizations.

    In the long run, organizations need to find their balance between manpower cost for optimizing and cloud/on-premise capacity cost.

    1. Kevin Johnston

      Re: Short lived memories, maybe?

      I would follow this with comments from being in the industry since almost before it became an industry

      In the early days there were limitation on every aspect from CPU (I have worked on systems where the CPU did not come on a simple chip...more like 2-3 boards) to RAM to persistent storage. People learned to optimise there work within these limits and often very creative solutions were found

      Once each limit was eased so did the requirement for tightly managed code and so the practise of coding changed to include processes which made things simpler although less structured. A simple program which previously ran in 16k of RAM now had 640K to play in so why did it matter if it meandered a bit and loops/searches were not as efficient..it still ran and that was what counted. To this were added helpful compilers and suchlike to make coding less like a black art and more like copy/paste from useful libraries of coding examples so that anyone could now write code.

      We finally reached the point where the OS was using over 100GB of your PCs hard disc and even simple documents/spreadsheets are measured in MB and the lean/mean suite of programs required for a modern office can either be another 100GB on your PC or some unknown value in the cloud. Add to this the move of snapshots and backups to cloud systems and I would be surprised if most IT departments actually knew how much data they really had and how much of it is meaningless junk.

      The C Suite people have never really cared about details just so long as they are promised improved perfection for a reduced cost and the days of having control over software, data and costs are a distant memory to most IT people with the fragmentation of responsibilities which are part and parcel of the cloud where costs are based on data volumes either at rest or moving and CPU usage. all measured by tools kindly provided by the cloud owner who is busy preparing the bill.

      While it would be great to think that moving back to on-prem is still an option, none of the main software providers want that to happen since they are too busy pushing the new licensing models which require them to exert maximum control over what you can do with your data.

      1. Pascal Monett Silver badge

        Re: The C Suite people have never really cared about details

        Of course not.

        They can't understand them.

  5. Bebu
    Windows

    "Why didn't anyone ask the admin*?"

    From my own recollection the stampede towards the cloud, and outsourcing generally, rarely involved consulting the poor system administrators that would have to manage the ensuing fiasco. Fortunately (sic) that function was often also subsequently outsourced thereby compounding the felony.

    Was frequently a C suite chap knew another chap who claimed his outfit was saving a motza by being in the cloud with the inevitable board diktat with unfortunate consequences.

    * or indeed Evans.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: "Why didn't anyone ask the admin*?"

      Funny, that’s how my last employer ended up in Oracle Cloud despite opposition from literally everyone in technical leadership

    2. Michael Strorm Silver badge

      Re: "Why didn't anyone ask the admin*?"

      Exactly. Back when the "cloud" hype was first ramping up, I remember a far more generally-sceptical attitude *actual* "admin" types here and elsewhere.

      Not only did the move to The Cloud always gave the impression of being management-driven, but those same sceptics were already pointing out and predicting many of the issues that have now come to fruition.

      Of course, "CxOs don't care whether if the cloud was such a good idea after all, because they reaped the short-termist benefits and moved on long before any of the easily-predicted consequences actually happened" isn't such a catchy headline.

    3. Diogenes8080

      Re: "Why didn't anyone ask the admin*?"

      If you were a cloud advocate, we were the enemy - a pure and simple sales obstruction.

    4. mahan

      Re: "Why didn't anyone ask the admin*?"

      From a management perspective the promise of the cloud was that they could eventually get rid of those pesky, expensive, admin types and save a good penny, so why on earth would they listen to those guys in the first place? "They would say anything to save their job"

      We all know how that ended up now, but history will repeat itself as management is almost never held responsible for anything further away than a quarter or a year-end.

  6. Pascal Monett Silver badge

    "an initial euphoric rush to the cloud"

    No kidding. It was as if cannabis had be legalized and every marketdroid was offering blunts.

    And all the CxOs partook . . .

    1. Michael Strorm Silver badge

      Re: "an initial euphoric rush to the cloud"

      Bingo. "All the CxOs", not "admins" as the article title suggests (and someone which someone else already picked up on before I could).

      From what I remember, the original "rush to the cloud" and buying into the hype was always primarily management-driven and there was plenty of scepticism in forums like The Register's from actual "admin" types in general.

      1. TheMeerkat Silver badge

        Re: "an initial euphoric rush to the cloud"

        > the original "rush to the cloud"

        Not just CxO.

        It is often also driven by consideration of their CV enhancement by software developers. Somehow being in AWS is regarded as a “good thing” by programmers and software architects.

        1. AVee

          Re: "an initial euphoric rush to the cloud"

          Yes, because there suddenly was a thing called DevOps which said that development and operation should be run by the same team. This sure makes sense in a certain cases, but tbe CxO's interpreted it as 'fire all the Ops people' and the Devs where sold the lie that you can do Ops without knowing anything about it using <insert cloud provider here>.

          But the thing that fascinates me most is how black and white this discussion is. It seems that the options are either on prem do everything yourself on your own hardware or go all in on cloud using all the features that lock you to a provider. You can still rent managed hardware in a datacenter, you can run your stuff on standard virtual servers that are trivial to move to a different provider. It's generally trivial to find a solution where you don't have to deal with your own hardware but aren't locked to a provider either.

  7. Mr. Flibble

    "administrators are questioning the value and promise of the tech giant's services."

    If they were good administrators, they would have been wondering this /before/ the move to the cloud, but were probably ignored....

    1. J. Cook Silver badge
      Mushroom

      A rant about Microsoft and their On-prem stuff...

      As one of those admins, I can tell you this: We were ignored; we fought it tooth and nail. but ultimately lost for a few reasons, at least for MS Exchange:

      1) Security. getting "ZOMG PATCH THIS YESTERDAY" level security exploits on an application that's allegedly supported every month (and sometimes more often!) results in patch fatigue by the admin that's both overworked and underappreciated (and usually underpaid!) having to drop everything yet again to check and deploy a patch to a bunch of servers and deal with the resulting flood of complaints from people expecting 12 nines of uptime. It. Gets. Old.

      2) Feature Rot. Seeing features that are uncommon, but used get unilaterally removed or broken by a cumulative update or security patch bundle with no notice or clear upgrade path, and having the next version of the application not have that functionality whatsoever also gets old.

      3) and finally, a move to a subscription license for the on-prem application. If we have to pay the same amount for the on-premise email server that we are paying for the Online version, why bother with the hassle of the on-prem version?

      We migrated our users once we figured out the 'migration path' for Unified Messaging (removed entirely in Exchange 2019, with Teams taking over that fully) and the ~200 shared voicemail extensions we have left in the environment are getting shoved back to Unity which we used to have before Exchange rolled out Unified Messaging back with the 2007 version. (It helps that Cisco relaxed their pricing for that platform finally.) It also removes the stress of wildcat exploits, emergency patches, and other mitigation strategies and general system administration of the underlying OS.

      It also gives me (said overworked admin) time back for the other infrastructure projects I've had to put on the back burner due to the 'drop everything and patch now!!!11oneroneone' monthly hair-on-fire sessions, AND also allows me to tell our support group "user is licensed correctly for email, troubleshoot the client end and provide proof before bugging me with it next time" when people are using an out of date client.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: A rant about Microsoft and their On-prem stuff...

        From what I can see - we couldn't get Cyber Insurance if we still had on-prem exchange servers. We had no desire to go down the office 365 route, but were forced to.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: A rant about Microsoft and their On-prem stuff...

        <Quote>

        from people expecting 12 nines of uptime.

        </Quote>

        Usually despite having no redundancy built into the application

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: A rant about Microsoft and their On-prem stuff...

        So you're basically saying you're lazy. Because that's simply part of your job.

        I'm surprised you still have a job and weren't declared redundant.

  8. The Vociferous Time Waster

    Cloud is a financial model not a technology

    If you can't build well on prem you won't be able to build well in the cloud - and vice versa.

    If you are cutting corners on prem you'll try to cut corners in the cloud, only you won't be able to sweat assets in the same way.

    If you have legacy and tech debt then you need to sort that out - if you sort it out on prem it will make your life just as easy as if you do it when you move to cloud.

    Cloud is great if you have lots of opex but not much Capex. On prem is better if you have access to more Capex and less opex. The last really well justified cloud migration I did was at a startup that had to lease its servers on prem because it didn't have the Capex to buy them. They slotted in very well to the cloud financial model with the backing and blessing of the CFO. The worst cloud migrations I have done have been at companies with constraint on opex who didn't think through the reasons for doing it.

    1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Re: Cloud is a financial model not a technology

      Perhaps rather than thinking in terms of capex and opex it would be best to just think in terms of money.

      1. J. Cook Silver badge
        Trollface

        Re: Cloud is a financial model not a technology

        It was explained to me like this:

        Capex: one time purchase of something, usually needing an ROI or expected usable service lifespan.

        Opex: recurring cost to keep something running, like support contracts or cloud services.

        The latter can be budgeted against, whereas (at least at [RedactedCo]) we have to ask for Capex money every year. (and the period to collect those requests keeps getting earlier and earlier, I swear to bog...)

        The beancounters generally like having those two categories separate in order to run their analysis of why IT keeps costing them so much money and why can't we go back to calculators and paper. /sarcasm

        1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

          Re: Cloud is a financial model not a technology

          The beancounters are probably too lazy or incompetent to work out how many years opex would add up to more than doing in as capex.

          1. Chloe Cresswell Silver badge

            Re: Cloud is a financial model not a technology

            I have a client who builds certain companies then sells them. Normally things like fostering agencys, and in home care.

            Every time he starts a new company, he is 100% "must be in cloud, only opex, no capex for the backend". All the capex is laptops/office equipment to run it.

            We know how much it would cost either way, but that's the client's instructions, so it doesn't matter how much they would save with even just some of their stuff onprem.

            1. keithpeter Silver badge
              Windows

              Re: Cloud is a financial model not a technology

              Most of the in-home care workers I see going to clients (on public transport) have a smart phone and are logging stuff in an app. So I'm assuming there is a Web server/app set-up available for lease? (this is UK).

              1. Chloe Cresswell Silver badge

                Re: Cloud is a financial model not a technology

                Normally something like CarePlan, yes.

                But the costs for them for the last one we setup was the cost of Sharepoint vers a local server: When you have people in an office using sharepoint/onedrive for file storage, it gets expensive when the file is only being shared with people in that same office *nods*

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Cloud is a financial model not a technology

          It is all about taxes and depreciation. You can write-off more opex than you can capex. This is the number one reason the bean counters like it.

          1. HereIAmJH Silver badge

            Re: Cloud is a financial model not a technology

            Capex generates an asset. To get a tax break you have to depreciate it over a number of years.

            Opex is an expense. You can write it off in the quarter it was incurred.

            This allows them to run IT under the same models as buy vs lease that is used for real estate and equipment. I worked for a company once that bought land, built their HQ on it, sold it and leased it back. It's the short term thinking way that shareholders seem to like. No one ever considers that it actually costs more in the long term because that 3rd party will be billing you for their profits.

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: Cloud is a financial model not a technology

              The true mastery in your scenario is to also own the leasing company so the profit does but also does not come back to you

      2. doublelayer Silver badge

        Re: Cloud is a financial model not a technology

        Because they're money now and money continuously, and those are different. Not necessarily as different as accountants like to treat them, but different nonetheless. Have you ever rented somewhere to live? Why didn't you just buy a house? It's just paying for somewhere to live, after all, so surely it's the same. There are sometimes benefits from renting, and sometimes substantial downsides because you've paid a lot more than you needed to and don't have anything at the end, but you can't treat them as the same because there are times where the one that seems the more expensive is the only option that gets you what you need.

        1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

          Re: Cloud is a financial model not a technology

          In 5 years time the capex & previous years opex will both become money then. How much money? Which would have been cheaper?

          We've rented and bought as soon as we could manage to get a deposit together. At the point where we made that transition rent was money down the drain. Gone. Nothing, here and now (or there and then!) to show for it; money that wasn't available for a deposit to buy. Money spent on the deposit represented equity in property which will almost certainly increase in value (unlike a server, of course) and could subsequently be traded up which we did several times until we inherited.

          Our son rented for years before buying. He realises he has spent a lot of money with nothing to show for is hear and now and has, incidentally, had to pay far more than had he bought earlier.

          One very significant aspect of renting computer space, if the business were to stop and think about it, is that what's in that computer space may represent the whole of the company's value. Without it the physical stock, property, furniture and fittings are worth no more than than a forced sale would bring. If a bit of a cash flow problems comes along and they can't make the rent of a month or a quarter or whatever it it, then they might as well get the forced sale catalogues drawn up because they're no longer trading. It's not the same as renting the furniture or whatever.

          1. doublelayer Silver badge

            Re: Cloud is a financial model not a technology

            The comparison to property clarifies some reasons why people might prefer a more expensive cloud. You rented at first because you couldn't buy. There are people who want to start a business that will use some equipment but they can't buy, either the equipment itself, or more likely all the facilities needed to operate it. Fortunately, servers are very easily rented. You also pointed out the major difference between them, which is that buying property is likely to gain in value most of the time, whereas buying a server almost certainly will not. Buying equipment early will probably not help you if you're counting every penny, and if you're not well-resourced, you may have to do that.

            That doesn't mean cloud is always better, just that it can be. There are things you can do relatively cheaply with cloud that are expensive to do yourself. One easily understood example is multicontinent systems if you don't have offices all over. Employing a local hardware team is pretty expensive. Not hiring them and just putting your normal hardware team on the next flight when they're needed is less expensive until it isn't. Setting the region in the cloud console to a different country is easy. So if you need that, that can be a cheaper way to get it. As usual, someone actually has to figure out what you need and how much it costs to get it from the various places, which is something a lot of people want to skip for some reason.

            1. Oninoshiko

              Re: Cloud is a financial model not a technology

              This is correct, if you need less then a full server then running on a cloud-providor can result in savings. Once you hit a certain point however, moving your baseline load to privately owned servers is beneficial, only using cloud-providor for peaking-load.

              This also has the side effect of helping you stay more vendor neutral, allowing you to put that load on whoever's the cheapest at the time. This has been the case since before "cloud" became a buzzword for "someone else's servers."

              1. disk iops

                Re: Cloud is a financial model not a technology

                our little service is targeting exactly this. Most of the big boys and also those who offer "cloud rightsizing consulting and billing management" typically have their own OpenStack or other cloud-like MSP stack that while perhaps cheaper than AWS, it's not by a whole lot.

                Going back to mixed or on-prem is a bit PITA when you have to buy 1/2 a rack at minimum and then pay for bandwidth, interconnect and so on. And it also means you have to go source the IT talent to build it, if you were dumb enough to toss those guys overboard.

                If a "garage band" can offer you instead for a song, resilient storage (nee SAN), clustered nodes for seamless workload balancing across hardware, and has written lambda functions that can piggy back off of AWS/Azure auto-scaling triggers to scale out the on-prem to a point and then invoke cloud instances once a threshold is hit, what's not to like? Especially if you can take advantage of unmetered 10Gbps bidirectional circuits.

                $300/mo for 24+ cores and 256gb of ram, triple the typical storage quota, to slice and dice any way you want and has AWS DirectConnect or IPSec access is cheap even by rent-a-baremetal-server offerings.

                The problem with moving back to on-prem is the startup costs and if you do find someone who will offer it for OPEX they overcharge severely while still being less than AWS.

                Some cloud services (eg. S3) are simply no point competing with. But if there is an EC2 instance tacked onto the offering (eg. EKS) then the always-powered-on workload gets expensive right quick!

            2. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

              Re: Cloud is a financial model not a technology

              "There are people who want to start a business that will use some equipment but they can't buy, either the equipment itself, or more likely all the facilities needed to operate it. Fortunately, servers are very easily rented."

              OTOH the risk of not making the rent due to cash flow problems needs to be factored in. Will the vendor simply wipe the storage or keep it for a period & let you reconnect?

              1. doublelayer Silver badge

                Re: Cloud is a financial model not a technology

                That is a concern, which is why a good admin will have backups so the servers can be restored and design to scale down to fewer servers if that's needed. In many cases, if you don't have the money to run your servers and you need them to have your company work, you have lots of other problems, so owning the servers won't save you. For example, if you can't pay the monthly cloud bill, are you still able to pay any bills, including payroll, the ISP, the phones? Having your own servers behind a disconnected network link isn't much better.

          2. david1024

            Re: Cloud is a financial model not a technology

            When I rent vs buy... there's no cost of business to deduct.

            After a certain business size, being able to write off the server rent each year forever, is more attractive than running a free-server for just the cost of electricity.

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Cloud is a financial model not a technology

        But then the bean-counters would only have one spreadsheet to look at. Where's the fun in that?

  9. StrangerHereMyself Silver badge

    Megabill

    Ever since I read that story of a guy who ran some job on Google's cloud and made a programming error and racking up a $60,000 (!) bill over the weekend I've been steering clear of Cloud development.

    I wiped my AWS account as soon as I was done with it.

    I use VPS servers and run whatever I need on them, upping the memory and processor capacity as needed. No Cloud for me.

    1. theOtherJT Silver badge

      Re: Megabill

      A while back as part of a previous could transition we were told "Just get everything in the cloud. We have a really good deal with $vendor. Just get in in the cloud. It doesn't matter how much it costs. It'll be fine. Get it all in the cloud. We need to shut down the server room by the end of this quarter. In the cloud. Cloud in the get. Get. Cloud! In the it get. Cloud get. The in. Cloud. Cloud! Cloud! Cloud!" or hysterical management bleating that made about that much sense.

      We cautioned that this was going to be very expensive but just got more cries of "Cloud! Cloudy clouds! CLOUDDDDDD!" So ok, we ripped everything out, lift'n'shifted it into the cloud as fast and dirty as possible.

      Then the first month bill came in. It was ~$300,000.

      All of a sudden it really mattered that everyone "right size their deployment" and lots of questions were asked about why we had massive VM's with 48G of ram running simple workloads, and why aren't we using autoscaling groups etc.

      Well... because you said "It has to be in the cloud by the end of the year and we don't care what it costs" that's why. You wanted this costed you should have given us more than three months to do it. Of course everyone just selected the biggest machine they could get their hands on for their existing workload, we didn't have time to do any analysis before we started the migration and you'd have thrown a fit if the service broke, so every team went massively overboard on provisioning "just to be safe". If we wanted to rework everything to be capable of autoscaling that would have required a bunch of service redesign, and no one budgeted any time for that, so it wasn't done.

      1. StrangerHereMyself Silver badge

        Re: Megabill

        This nonsense of management who only know buzz-words yet having the last say on matters they know nothing about has lead me to leave the IT business and start my own software company.

        I'm done with idiots telling me what to do.

  10. Bazismad2

    Abiut time people woke up!

    The cloud was a bad idea even before its inception. This is a cost balloon and the most easily hijacked part of IT. The shifty IT directors and their plans to rip off the companies by feeding the accountants a load of crap, but more likely enjoining them into the scam. I have aways said that data is the lifeblood of any IT system and should be secured by the owners. Cloud storage and anything that you rent in IT is the finest example of the emperor's new clothes.

  11. Zippy´s Sausage Factory
    Unhappy

    After an initial euphoric rush to the cloud, administrators are questioning the value and promise of the tech giant's services.

    This all has an eerie familiar feeling to it. Like we've been through it before... mainframes? vendor lock in? something similar? all of the above? Or is that me just not being a true cloud believer? Maybe we'll never know...

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Say it with me...

      Distributed Computing

  12. V R

    Cloud is not for admins !

    Here lies the fundamental issue, infrastructure exists for applications and applications are created by developers .

    The biggest value for the cloud is to eliminate the need for button pushers polishing their VM's and trying to control developers because of inflated egos.

    What reports like these fail to mention, is the developer velocity gained by being able to release features faster than being on premises. Of course, throw in the fact that you don't need admins to manage the infra, the ROI is well justified!

    Ps, the pricing is a whole load of bullocks.. you don't mention what 3 node cluster configuration was used and any pricing concessions such as reservations were even considered. As with most articles on el register, just aimed at the admin who feels glorified pushing buttons.

    1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Re: Cloud is not for admins !

      Do I sense a developer with an inflated ego here?

      Let's fix that opening statement:

      Here lies the fundamental issue, infrastructure exists for applications and applications are created by developers exist for the business. It matters rather less who crested the application. It could be developed in house. It could alternatively be bought in or it could be FOSS (free as in beer as well as in speech!). And you don't need developers to install the last two.

      I should point out that my preferred method of handling all this is as a unified team that develops and administers its own applications, in house and on prem. That way you don't write what you can't administer and if you find you can't administer it properly you rewrite it to fix it.

      1. V R

        Re: Cloud is not for admins !

        I think you answered your value add , seriously do we need people to "install" software, might as well hire people who can write code and add value . The cloud is why uber , Lyft, Netflix exists, gave more freedom to the developers and not get bogged down by Admins and infra teams taking weeks to provision infra and always being the bottleneck, err..should I state button pushing bottlenecks.

        1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

          Re: Cloud is not for admins !

          do we need people to "install" software

          Easily addressed. As a freelancer I took a very short contract (the technical term is "afternoon" ) to install some bought-in software for one company before returning to my main contract of writing software for another company.

          Of course, the software written for the main client also had to be installed. Unfortunately they'd gone down the route of having a separate admin group and communication between the two" was not ideal. I did miss the situation of having the access to do both sides. I do appreciate your frustration with having admin separate from development. I spent the entire two weeks of a holiday cover contract for a really badly segmented company doing the paperwork to get one admin team to provide some extra disk space to enable the DBA team I was with to add to the database. Crazy!

          You are highlighting a very valid point but the real problem is that of company structure and culture. That's a problem that should be fixed, not bypassed.

          " And maybe with the management. We'd developed the application so that configuration of new products on the system could and should be done through the UI and the manager insisted it should be done through SQL run by admin, That was tricky, which is why it we'd automated it.

      2. JRStern

        Re: Cloud is not for admins !

        OMG had to downvote that. Developers get too bored doing admin, and admins generally know nothing about development.

        For small shops sometimes you double up, but it's very very rare that it works, usually one or both sides suffer. Greatly.

        Devops is a horrible idea for larger shops.

        IMHO of course.

    2. UnknownUnknown

      Re: Cloud is not for admins !

      You lost the room when you used ‘developer velocity’ to justify your argument.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Cloud is not for admins !

        120mph after falling for 8 seconds

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Cloud is not for admins !

      We have many who think like you in our company. Currently they are struggling with things like PCI compliance and general vulnerability management of their VMs because at best they only have experience of doing it in a very targeted manner on their app, if even that. They have very few people who are in a position to help them, as the admins have largely been let go or outsourced to companies who only provide bodies. This was all foreseen and ignored.

      Sure, some of these tasks can be given to the cloud vendor, but then you're really locked in.

      1. Lee D Silver badge

        Re: Cloud is not for admins !

        My first thought upon reading this ego-trip was "data protection", "network security", "regulatory compliance".

        Thinking that all admins do is "install the software" is a complete disregard behind the entire process of requiring:

        - Resource usage predictions (disk, CPU, bandwidth - all chargeable in the cloud)

        - DPA, GDPR and other analysis of what, where and how things are stored and processed.

        - PCIDSS and other compliances.

        - Permissions, security, firewalling, reverse-proxying and other access to the new services.

        - MAINTAINING all of the above - including change management, removal, testing,

        - The time to do all the above BEFORE user data gets onto the system (and potentially breaks the law).

        - The finance and staffing to do all the above.

        I wouldn't trust the average developer to install a simple piece of software. They'd just click through the EULA, install every listed dependency in full without checking, not licence it properly, copy and paste a debug library from their machine, and then fail to remove it all when it was no longer required.

        If you've ever seen the mess on a developer machine, and looked into why they love Docker and containers ("Hey, it works on my machine, let's just throw everything into the container to make it work for everyone") you'll know why it's a terrible idea.

        The combination of "I'm a developer, let me just deploy without red tape getting in the way" and "This is an internet-connected service, exposed to the world, with our user's data on" makes me cringe.

  13. ITMA Silver badge
    Devil

    I can see nobody else has said it....So I will

    "Admins wonder if the cloud was such a good idea after all"

    No shit!

  14. Pete Sdev Bronze badge
    Meh

    Rainy clouds?

    The main driver is increased electricity prices.

    Which would still also effect any organisation that's moved to the cloud if they had hypothetically kept running their own DC instead.

    So this story is really: electricity has become more expensive which means it costs more to run servers.

    1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Re: Rainy clouds?

      Or is it that electricity has become more expensive and gives cloud vendors an excuse to hike their profit margins.

      1. doublelayer Silver badge

        Re: Rainy clouds?

        Probably some of both, and in the areas of increasing price we can also add the price of workers. Somebody needs to replace broken things and write the software to administer the hardware, whether in cloud or not. When running on prem, the price of the latter is often outsourced to a company from whom management software is bought, but they're probably increasing prices too. It's likely that prices to run a server anywhere has increased, and that when they increased for cloud providers, those providers tacked on a bit more when they raised the prices to account for it. I don't like it, but it is what I can expect from any company; I'm sure those who have higher prices to run their server rooms have passed that on to me and added a bit more as well. I can't stop it, but at least I should not be surprised when it happens.

  15. Sparkus

    No Sympathy

    The ever-upward creep of cloud pricing, both in real terms and in relative comparison to on-prem costs, was openly predicted by quite a few people.

  16. Charlie Clark Silver badge

    End of innovation and efficiency gains

    I think the electricity price idea is a red herring: all things being equal, for the same over time, power demand should decline as more efficient hardware is used.

    The model is predicated that companies will find the move from CAPEX to OPEX preferable, especially as systems scale up: 100,000 servers will cost you more over time if you rent them, but you'll have to pay up front for your own. In addition, vendors promised that they would be the better administrators and would be able to squeeze greater efficiencies out of shared infrastructure than clients could on their own. However, it looks like that advantage disappeared a few years ago and has since been superseded by the hydra of complexity as the vendors have to manage more and more complex operations and abstractions. They're probably also introducing cross-subsidies to make their "AI" offerings looks more competitive: there are potential advantages there for those who don't offer them.

    1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Re: End of innovation and efficiency gains

      "would be able to squeeze greater efficiencies out of shared infrastructure"

      Cui bono? Who gets to benefit from the greater efficiency?

      1. Charlie Clark Silver badge

        Re: End of innovation and efficiency gains

        Indeed, but it has very much, along with apparently infinite scalability, the value proposition of the jailers lock-in vendors.

  17. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    What happened to Eucalyptus?

    There were a pile of promising OpenSource projects (Eucalyptus and DeltaCloud). That provided AWS API implementations so you could use cloud APIs completely independently of the cloud providers.

    It would be great if we actually had a choice to run AWS workloads on-site.

  18. Nate Amsden

    different kinds of cloud

    Personally I realized the cloud scam (specifically, IaaS) back in 2010, and have been bitching about it ever since, fortunately have not really had to deal with it since 2012.

    But there is another kind of cloud that may be worth while depending on your needs, that is SaaS. Even before cloud was a thing SaaS was in many places, from DNS/email/web hosting to CDNs and things like that. I have personal experience at my first SaaS company back in 2003-2006 which was years before I think I heard of the term cloud, where the software was so complex, immature, and unstable that the customers really could not operate it on prem. I was technical lead of a project in fact to demonstrate to our largest customer at the time AT&T that they could in fact operate it themselves. It involved me setting up the software on their systems and then we sort of trained them to use it from a demo perspective. It never saw any transactions nor had any crashes because there was no activity on it, but even they ran screaming and were happy to have our org continue to operate the software. There was literally hundreds of XML config files, where even an extra space in the config would cause the app to puke. We used client SSL certs for authentication for one part of the system(the only place I've ever used client certs), super complex Java stack running on Tomcat/Weblogic/Oracle. AT&T paid the company I worked for a $1 million check for successful completion of that particular project. The company was acquired in 2006, a couple of months after I left (fortunately was still able to go back and buy the rest of my stock options).

    Fast forward 5-6 years and the different org I was at decided to use Chef configuration management. Similar situation (though not nearly as bad), operating that on prem looked to be pretty bad just based on comments I was reading at the time, so we opted for their cloud version (I think cost wise it was the same it was just a matter of preference which you wanted to do). Years after that I recall downloading Gitlab and installed it on prem, took one look at everything that was running and decided to nope out of that. Too complex, makes me feel like it would be super fragile. Developers ended up going with bitbucket at the time.

    Companies have an excuse to make their software practically unusable from an on prem perspective by just making it so complicated and fragile, that the only real way to use it is with SaaS. I think that is applying to more and more products out there (at least ones that aren't desktop oriented).

    Upside I suppose is for people like me who have been running mission critical internet facing infrastructure for the past 21 years that gives me plenty of opportunities in theory..

    But for sure, IaaS, as deployed by all the major clouds is, and has always been quite a scam. Biggest factor is resource utilization, paying for what you provision rather than what you use. Fixed instance sizes, etc etc. Object storage I suppose is one of the few things that is pay for what you use, but even then of course the big clouds are super expensive compared to other (even cloud) options from what I've seen over the years.

    But at least in many cases with SaaS the billing model is more clear(often times $ per user account which is easier to budget for and justify yes/no), and unlike IaaS you(customer) don't have to deal with the potential unreliability of the underlying infrastructure or software itself.

    1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Re: different kinds of cloud

      "Companies have an excuse to make their software practically unusable from an on prem perspective by just making it so complicated and fragile, that the only real way to use it is with SaaS"

      IaaS is nothing like as much a scam as that.

  19. Johnqm

    The main issues I see are that very few actually update their approach to running systems when they move to the cloud. Businesses who never wanted to deal with tech debt and optimisation continue to over pay in the cloud whereas those who look at how to use the features appropriately. I have not seen the mass savings that get talked about, I guess there are some scenarios out there where someone has managed to get them but on the whole it's largely cost neutral Vs. on premises but with a large gain in flexibility in what they can use technology wise.

    If people listened to the admins then things would work a lot better wherever they are hosted, cloud or not.

  20. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Will they listen now?

    I'm not a "analysts have long predicted an increase in public cloud prices."

    So is this why I've been continually ignored when I said cloud will be more expensive? I was constantly told it won't, it will save money when the legacy kit goes. Finally the bill came in and only now are they asking our supplier why is it more expensive when you said we'd save money? They finally admitted that it will be more expensive but you have easier access to data.

    Hmmm.

    1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Re: Will they listen now?

      That's "you have easier access to data" as opposed to "you have the data". It's a suable shift in the ownership of the data.

  21. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Get over yourselves please

    <braces for down votes>

    I love all this 'I told everyone cloud was crap and no-one believed me despite me always being right, but that's because they are da management and know nothing' or 'we have no vendor lock-in and do multi-cloud perfectly, and it hasn't cost us a penny more, despite all the multi-cloud training or the increased head count to make it work', or even the old classic of 'I've engineered our server environment so that we don't need cloud and it costs a tenth of what it would in <insert cloud provider>, and it does everything the business will ever need... but hey, they're screwed if I leave cos I'm a super hero IT guy and no-one else knows how this stuff works cos they're stupid'.

    Get over yourselves please. Cloud is here, it is not perfect and it will evolve. It solves a ton of problems, but creates some others. If any of you think there is a perfect IT environment out there then you're lying to yourselves- different organisations need different things and there is no one size fits all - one of clouds big benefits is that it allows change

    </and breathe>

    1. Drakon

      Re: Get over yourselves please

      > but hey, they're screwed if I leave cos I'm a super hero IT guy and no-one else knows how this stuff works cos they're stupid

      Unfortunately this problem also exists within the cloud.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Get over yourselves please

        Yep, absolutely, I was maybe hasty aligning that part with on-prem. Having been in IT for more years than I care to count, if there is one thing that I really can't stand it is the 'hero' IT guy who, well, thinks they are a hero. They're not, they're (a big) part of the problem

        1. An_Old_Dog Silver badge

          Heroes

          I never wanted to be a hero, and I never was. I never wanted to ride to the rescue by kludging up, on-the-fly, some piece of undocumented, unsupportable crap. I never wanted the 3AM calls. I never wanted to be the "indispensible man*" (who, BTW, will be stuck in his* current job forever, because he's* indispensible, mission-critical, etc.). These Cowboy Coders and Reckless Rangers gallop through organisations, leaving a trail of horsedroppings for the normies to deal with.

          But some people get off on that stuff.

          *Replace with relevant pronoun as desired.

          1. theOtherJT Silver badge

            Re: Heroes

            No one sane wants to be that guy.

            The problem is that terrible decision making, corporate egos, and lack of planning keep forcing people to be that guy. Sooner or later you get asked something like "Why is there a cron-job running an incomprehensible sed command over the output of this find command once a day? Also: Why the hell is this machine not fully patched?" Ah, well, that's because SCREAMING_HORROR_2.1.1 on here that outputs into this directory nightly, but it does it in the wrong format because one of our other machines got upgraded to version 2.3, so we updated all the SCREAMING_HORROR_CLIENTS to 2.3 but this one server is still on 2.1 and we needed to modify the output because the 2.3 client can't open it any more, but we can do that by...

            ...and of course at this point anyone sane would go "OK, stop there. Why not just update this one to 2.3 as well?" and then you have to explain that Dave, who's senior VP of something or other has a Mac, and the vendor that we bought SCREAMING_HORROR from discontinued Mac client support in 2.2 so for him to get the monthly reports we have to maintain the original output in the old format which is why this machine can never be upgraded, ever. Oh and that's also why it's running on an OS that's 5 versions out of date despite it being out of support because versions of SCREAMING_HORROR lower than 2.1.7 require a specific version of libfuckthis and libweresoscrewed that aren't shipped any more, and we tried to backport them, but that broke something else, so now there's also this whole separate vlan with just this one machine on to try and keep it at least somewhat safe which is why there's also a whole bastion server doing some really complicated port redirection on the main network and, how did you find out about this machine anyway?

            Absolute fucking bullshit like this is happening everywhere, all the time, and it's always because of Dave or someone like him and the fact that they're doing something really annoying and we can't make them stop because of their position in the org chart - and most large organizations have more than one Dave and they're all doing different bullshit and now, as a wise man once said, all your snowflakes are urine and you can't find the cat.

          2. driodsworld@gmail.com

            Re: Heroes

            I like this "These Cowboy Coders and Reckless Rangers gallop through organisations, leaving a trail of horsedroppings for the normies to deal with." it's original

    2. ecofeco Silver badge

      Re: Get over yourselves please

      https://medium.com/@antweiss/learned-helplessness-in-software-engineering-648527b32e27

      1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

        Re: Get over yourselves please

        I think the problem is more often imposed helplessness. Manglement build a structure based on some requirement such as belief that compartmentalisation improves security or that they need to find more roles for direct reports because more direct reports means more status. The compartments grow into fiefdoms. The inhabitants of one fiefdom, although not technically helpless if they have appropriate skills, are functionally helpless regarding the functions of another.

        1. Terry 6 Silver badge

          Re: Get over yourselves please

          I agree, but would add that once that crystallises every action that requires collaboration with two or more teams gets entangled in procedural requirements, internal politics, risk aversion and inertia.

          Which may start with "You can't talk to members of team X except by having your line manager talk to his line manager, who'll talk to his team member's manager, who'll talk to his team member". Which means that a simple, say, "Can we move that device's Ethernet port to the other side of the desk to make room for the second monitor...." will take 6 months- especially if there are different internal budgets that have to be authorised, for actions that actually are already paid for because Fred who does that job is already employed here.

    3. An_Old_Dog Silver badge

      Re: Get over yourselves please

      @AC 17:38 GMT:

      ...there is no one size fits all ...

      THIS.

      The general problem with the cloud is that it's like some gold flakes buried under dekalitres of snake oil. People (customers) digging for the gold mainly find the snake oil which marketers are hosing around. The cloud is great for those situations where it's a good fit. Most situations the cloud is being sold into are not a good fit.

      Consider the cloud vs its old-times ancestor, data processing bureaus/computer time-sharing. Back then (the 1960s and 70s), hardware costs were high, and people costs were low. There were relatively few people operating those mainframes, and they were relatively well-trained. The odd PFY might screw up ("I thought that was an '8', not a '3'!"), and mount your master payments magtape with write ring inserted, onto a drive being used by another company's program, but with some luck, the other company's program would check the tape's VSN before writing upon it. In the worst case, your tape would be scribbled on, but you'd have backups.

      Today, data center costs are inverted: hardware is cheap, and (well-trained) people are expensive.

      Further, modern data centers are larger than old-style mainframe machine rooms, hold more machines and data sets, are more-interconnected, and more-complex, requiring bunches more people to administer. To increase profits, cloud providers employ less-well-trained and less-experienced people (Ninety-Day Wonders working for some offshore contractor).

      Further blackening the stew is the modern Internet, via which world+dog can attack these cloud systems. So businesses run more, and bigger, risks processing their, or their customers', supposed-to-be-private data via the cloud, vs the risks of procesing it via old-style data-processing bureaus/timesharing.

      1. doublelayer Silver badge

        Re: Get over yourselves please

        The other problem, other than the snake oil, is that a lot of people want a single choice solution. They want the cloud to either be good or bad, so even without a marketer trying to pretend that something does what it doesn't, you have many people attempting to simplify a complicated problem. The finance person likes the Opex option, so they say that cloud must be better than anything else, so let's switch all our computers to that. Admins, as many here have demonstrated, have some, possibly accurate, reasons to be skeptical of the cloud, but they decide that it means all cloud options are always bad. Sometimes, their reasons are perfectly accurate, but sometimes they're also faulty. For example, one admin I knew who disapproved of cloud for, in my view, the same reason that he disapproved of Linux: he eventually learned how to administer a Windows server without setting it on fire and didn't want to learn anything else ever again.

        In many cases, you actually have to calculate it out. What do we want to do. How much does it cost to do it with cloud supplier number 1? How much with supplier 2? How much right here in this building? How much in a colo nearby? What extra things do we gain with each option? The cloud probably provides us faster networking without having to do extra work. The local server room likely decreases our costs to add more systems there. What risks are there with each option. And now that we've done all that boring stuff, we can actually eliminate some options and make a decision. A lot of people want to skip this and use worse reasons, or no reasons at all, to pick one.

  22. david1024
    IT Angle

    hahha

    Well, for as long as it lasts, it is hard to beat the operating cost of that old power edge behind the breakroom door, propped against the server-rack, or on the interns desk.

  23. Terry 6 Silver badge

    Oh really.....

    "more than a third of organizations surveyed reckoned that their move to the cloud had failed to live up to promises of cost-effectiveness. Over half reported a rise in their cloud bill."

    Bears preferred defecating among the trees.

    Pontiff yearns for the Vatican.

  24. Mike Lewis

    It seems to me...

    that the cloud is useful when you cannot predict your load. If you're running a site with a predictable load, you can provision it for that and keep it in-house. If you have one that sometimes needs many instances then out-house is the way to go.

  25. DS999 Silver badge

    Cloud storage and bandwidth prices increasing

    Is obviously an effect of a monopoly. Because storage is getting cheaper and bandwidth is getting cheaper, meaning the cloud provider's costs are going down. So there's no reason why the price you're being charged as a customer for storage and bandwidth is going up other than greed. Such price increases can only stick when you've effectively got a monopoly,

    1. Peter Gathercole Silver badge

      Re: Cloud storage and bandwidth prices increasing

      You've missed out the vendor lock-in part. It's not really a monopoly, until you consider that even though there are multiple large cloud providers, the cost of moving from one to another is so prohibitive, and often requires re-engineering of an application because of lack of standardization.

      This part should have been predictable during the engineering of the cloud application, but again who listened to the prople who know these things.

  26. Telford dave

    Point is Missed

    For SME's (that is most companies) it is not just a ROI issue it is a security and good governance issue. The cost of maintaining an effective and available on-prem ICT service without cloud is just not possible

  27. clintos

    Must be gov driven

    Lies lies lies...The cloud, once the fluffy, weightless symbol of digital freedom, has realised its worth—just like electric cars. It’s no longer content being the invisible hero of modern life, where we merrily stored cat photos and Netflix binge histories for next to nothing. Now, the cloud has woken up and thought, "Why shouldn't I demand a small fortune for letting humanity float around on virtual cotton candy?"

    Just like electric cars—once the eco-friendly, guilt-free solution to saving the planet—the cloud was the solution to our tangled wires and clunky servers. But just like electric vehicles that once quietly hummed along, revolutionizing transportation, their prices have begun to soar to new heights. It’s almost as if the cloud and electric cars are having a secret meeting behind the scenes: "Hey, batteries are expensive, so should be your data storage! Why? Because... innovation!"

    Now, with prices rising, it’s like both the cloud and battery-driven cars are saying, “Oh, you wanted to save money *and* the planet? How adorable! Here’s a premium bill for that privilege.” And what are we to do? Grin, bear it, and take out a second mortgage so we can continue to upload selfies while driving our electric SUVs into the digital sunset, all while both the cloud and electric cars wink knowingly at each other, sipping overpriced lattes made from ethically sourced server racks and lithium-ion batteries. All fools to the slaughter

  28. -martin-

    As an embedded developer - working the other side of the cloud, I see very poor implementations in the cloud - that's why it costs so much money, as well as drive to store so much useless data and statistics - that no one ever really looks at, except for kicks!

    Use embedded philosophies in the cloud and the costs plummet. Stop using these silly frameworks - most backend developers don't even understand bit fields...for example.

  29. MTimC

    Bought vs rented resources need to be managed differently

    I used to run the PS for an IT discovery outfit (now part of BMC), when cloud was starting.

    IT spending was very opaque: much effort went into hiding where costs were incurred and recovering them in later years.

    Around 50% of capex was for assets that were not used. Cloud could change that, but few seemed to want to measure where the money was actually going. But you have to put the measurement in place. And, if you're worried about vendor lock-in, invest in portability. Although, I'm not a fan of using multiple clouds or hybrid delivery as it's much harder to keep the moving parts working efficiently.

    The biz case for cloud is similar to the biz case for the heritage electricity market: capex is a function of peak demand, profitability a function of utilisation, so aggregate demand (qv Nick Carr's "The Big Switch") It works better than owning and managing the kit for most loads. Competition should ensure that this situation remains.

    Of some concern may be that Civo seems to be encountering large barriers to entry, which will reduce market competition.

  30. anonymous boring coward Silver badge

    As a normal consumer I see value in using "the cloud", or as we called it "a server somewhere".

    As a decent size corporation, I'm not so sure about the value of it.

  31. Lee D Silver badge

    Gosh you mean that when they lowered their prices and it was somehow "cheaper" to run servers in large, expensive datacenters with multiple-location redundancy and service level agreements, they were really just luring you in to migrate all your infrastructure to be utterly dependent on them, and then they later started to pull the rug from under you once they had your entire business processing and data on their services?

    Whodathunk?

    I also looked at the new Microsoft backup service recently, interested in backing up the one, single VM we have on Azure. The pricing was LUDICROUS. As in multiples of our current backup solution for ALL our VMs.

    Between that and the constant obsoletion on Azure of types of VM, new generations of resources (and the fact that you can't just change one for another, but have to buy the new one, configure it in a switchover which incurs downtime for that resource, and then delete the old one, etc.), I cannot justify continuing our planned move to cloud at the moment.

    We bought a new in-house cluster instead and I have about 5 years before the support on that runs out at which point we'll make a decision again, but I can't see anything getting cheaper at all in that time.

    Cloud always was a bait-and-switch and now that all your stuff is in the cloud (and usually not easy to rip-out and move to an alternative provider except in the most basic ways), the "bait" phase has ended.

  32. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Maybe Hock Tan was right?

    Maybe uncle Hock bought VMware to catch this swing back to on-premises for all the reasons stated above, including "regulatory concentration risk" type things (DORA for the EU)?

    Maybe the "money grabbing VC CEO" knew what he was doing after all? ($$$)

    Maybe a well-managed private cloud is better/cheaper/faster for 80% of the workloads?

    Maybe the un-hip "hybrid" model is right?

    Maybe "cloud first" one-size-fits all is perilously naive?

    <cue furious debate, upvotes and downvotes; or silence>

    [disclaimer: I like VMware, even now]

    1. Oneman2Many Bronze badge

      Re: Maybe Hock Tan was right?

      No wonder your cloud costs are so high. Anyone migrating VM to cloud don't understand where you should be using cloud hosting.

  33. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Problems with using the cloud approach are more likely due to decisions by the cloud suppliers rather than the technology itself - you need to be wary when dealing with companies that have progressed beyond "too big to fail/jail" and are now, in C.Doctorow's terminology, "too big to care" ( about customers, employees, regulators ).

  34. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Cloud first strategy

    "we have a cloud first strategy" says the CIO.

    Why?

    There isn't actually an answer to that other than he has to look like he's one of the hip and groovy kids and down with the latest shizzle.

    It's literally that.

    My employer runs vast data centres, we have the capability to host this stuff ourselves but no, it's cloud first all the way...

    We did realise last year though that Azure were price gouging but the response was just to start putting more stuff into another public cloud instead.

  35. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    It has it's uses. Saving money isn't one of them.

    I work in a regulated industry. Sysadmins spend most of their days patching. In the cloud things may not work but they won't go unpatched.

    We're also changing our complete business stack. The old one and the data centres it runs in should be gone in 5 years when the new (running on "private cloud" servers somewhere else in the multinational) is completed. Do I tell them they won't get it finished in 5 years? No, I say we'll exit the datacentres to go to cloud and only pay for what we use. I know the business are thinking that will be zero after five years and it will be cheaper than renewing the infrastructure on-prem. I personally think they'll kill the migration project after 3.5 years and it will wind up 3x as expensive but hey, my (and the IT dept.s) arse is covered.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: It has it's uses. Saving money isn't one of them.

      "Sysadmins spend most of their days patching. In the cloud things may not work but they won't go unpatched."

      I guess that is the one advantage of the cloud - you can at least see all of your assets. There aren't hidden abandoned/things on your network its totally transparent.

      Being able to read all of the config in one place through a cloud admin console is pretty handy. Better than poking around a million documents that may or may not have the thing you are looking for...

  36. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Wrong!

    You’re confusing ‘Admins’ with ‘Beancounters’

  37. MuleD

    Tearing my F&*king hair out

    To start with I am old. I have been doing computer security for 25 years now so my opinion is jaded. BUT....

    I Fu#*ing told you so.......For years I have been shouting into the void that a "cloud solution" should not be thought of as a cost savings strategy. It might be a great solution, I am pro-cloud for a LOT of things, but just because it has the word cloud in in does not mean its "faster, better, cheaper" I am not sure who first started saying that the cloud will be cheaper but they need strung up by their balls and twisted. It was Shakesphere said to "kill all the Lawyers first" I vote for the salesmen second. --MuleD

  38. I miss PL/1

    You might as well say

    It's cheaper for people to generate their own electricity than to buy it off the grid. But if your generator goes down what do you do then? People don't factor in the cost of having a distributed fault tolerant global architecture when they consider costs. And that architecture is available for the smallest mom and pop shop up to Fortune 500s.

    Clouds democratize infrastructure. That's what they do best.

    What would be the cost for a customer to always have the latest and greatest hardware at massive scale at the touch of a button in their on premises data center?

    1. anonymous boring coward Silver badge

      Re: You might as well say

      Democratise?

      Can we vote for better management of the cloud company we use?

  39. Blackjack Silver badge

    I told you, you just ignored me

    Your data flew away like a bee.

    The company made a mistake

    The bill was too much to take

    The backups, they where online

    You are nothing, nothing but fine.

    Boo boo, what are you going to do?

    Hey maybe perhaps you could sue?

  40. JRStern

    TANSTAAFL

    Cloud is like anything - easy to get into, but at some point becomes a pain. And since you can blame stuff on them, you do so.

    Just a note on prices, that big users get significant volume discounts.

    I tried to engineer a seriously big app on Azure and found gaps in their platform, sometimes literally. Some of that was my ignorance (and that of the entire team and management), but the roadblocks were different than they would have been on-premise.

    In these inflationary days why is it a shock that cloud prices go up? Oh, computers always get cheaper, right? Well no, not really, not last five to ten years, not like it used to do. And these days every little thing has to be "monetized". Wait until they start charging you to have Copilot keep watch on things, LOL.

  41. navarac Silver badge

    For Cloud, 'read' some other idiots server. "They" have spent so much dosh on AI that they have to raise prices, and recoup some outlay. It'll all end in tears.

  42. TM™

    Underinflated

    Would the measure of inflation 'calculated' in each country by the largest employer and largest debtor in the country using a formula signed off by real asset holding politicians?

  43. Oneman2Many Bronze badge

    Obviously not done much hosting, the real cost these days is power (and hence) cooling and land costs.

  44. Oneman2Many Bronze badge

    As has been pointed out, there are cases for cloud, there are cases for on prem and there are cases for hybrid and several inbetween There are so many factors to take into account that making blank statements that all cloud hosting is more expensive is clearly dumb. Saying that, if I had to make a blanket statement then it would be don't migrate VM to cloud, design your app to be cloud native and it makes sense to cloud host.

  45. ultiweb

    I guess if you're living in an alternate reality or just don't have even a basic grasp of economics, then you might actually believe that prices have increased due to "corporate greed". Our electricity co-op is now passing on the congestion based pricing that has been charged by their upstream supplier for several years. The push to electrify everything has a massive cost. Did you really believe that corporations could just eat that cost? Seriously? It's long past time to face reality.

  46. 0laf Silver badge
    Holmes

    Predicted at the start

    15-20yr ago we predicted that cloud would tempt SMTs to shift data centres to the cloud and when they were locked in the vendors would turn the screw on prices. I'm just shocked it's taken this long.

    We also said a little later that businesses needed to invest on configuring their systems to take advantages of the way cloud worked because just dumping their on-prem systems into a cloud host would be expensive. But businesses never like spend-now save-later.

    But it's too late now, those data centres have been closed, the staff paid off or retired and the beancounters have taken those paper savings and removed them from the balance sheet. No going back so you'd better just lean over that barrel and find something to bite on.

  47. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    First rule of cloud usage, hire or train one person to be a full time cloud admin with mandtory cost admin skills. That's what saved us the most, someone who was there every 5 mins nagging people to stop wasting money, stop using services that had no value or relevance, forcing people to think twice and always ready to help advise on the most efficient and cost effective way to save money on projects.

    We had to move 700 systems from a datacentre and we have 4 months to do it, we stripped down and simply ported into AWS. It wasn't nice but it got the job done. Then we spent 6 months rationalizing everything down to round 250 systems and we came in around 30% under the initial cloud budget as we engaged very closely with the tech sales bods at AWS.

    Our finops admin was an absolute pain in the arse at times but my god he earned his money and I hope the company gave him a decent bonus and pay rise.

  48. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Explain abbreviations on first use

    If you are going to use abbreviations in an article please bracket the first use. i.e ROI (Return on investment).

    In the world I move in, ROI is commonly used to mean 'Region of Interest'. Every time I see ROI in this article, I see region of interest.

    Just because ROI means return on investment to you doesn't mean it's the same for others.

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon

Other stories you might like