back to article Cloud repatriation officially a trend... for specific workloads

The reality of the cloud market is that many organizations find it doesn't live up to their expectations, leading to a growing trend of workloads being repatriated back on-premises or to private cloud environments. This is according to IDC, which notes that one of the major drivers for cloud adoption was the promise of cost …

  1. DJO Silver badge

    No gif in comments

    many businesses have found themselves spending more on cloud resources than they anticipated.

    GIF of Fry from Futurama saying "I'm shocked, Shocked! Well, not that shocked"

    Or maybe one of Captain Renault in Casablanca : "I'm shocked! Shocked"

    1. UnknownUnknown

      Re: No gif in comments

      AI cost v’s value next.

      Shocked at that too:

  2. KittenHuffer Silver badge

    The 'Cloud' dream is over!

    I always had issues seeing how the cloud would be better for businesses (those buying it rather than those selling it). But then I always had issues handing data across to someone else with no control over security or backups.

    I doubt that the industry is too bothered though ..... they do have the next big thing (AI) to sell to the chu .... I mean customers!

    </cynical_old_fart>

    1. EricB123 Silver badge

      Re: The 'Cloud' dream is over!

      "</cynical_old_fart>"

      And damn proud to be one as well.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Captain obvious

    No shit Sherlock.

    Makes the CapEx bit of the spreadsheet look good though.

    Every day this year we've had some sort of cloud related outage (we are *big* and have a lot of diverse cloud shit)

    1. Sir Sham Cad

      Re: Captain obvious

      Absolutely the eternal bouncing between CapEx and OpEx. Especially when shit you've bought on CapEx eventually moves to the OpEx book when support/subscriptions run out.

      We're currently spending a six figure sum to maintain a DR instance we don't (and hopefully won't) use and, naturally, that's rightly catching the eye of the beancounters.

      Currently having sector-wide discussions on Cloud Adoption and, as one of the few in the group who actually have a significant (Redmond) Cloud presence, I'm waving my arms above my head screaming Noooooo!

      1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

        Re: Captain obvious

        "We're currently spending a six figure sum to maintain a DR instance we don't (and hopefully won't) use and, naturally, that's rightly catching the eye of the beancounters."

        I suppose they've already cancelled the buildings insurance, public liability insurance etc.

  4. Dostoevsky Bronze badge

    S.E.C.

    "Somebody Else's Computer" is usually not the best place for "One's Own Data."

  5. TheBadja

    Cycle in, cycle out

    There is a new CIO. First step - review Opex expenses - boy our cloud bill is expensive.

    Let’s migrate it back in.

    Two years down the track, having spent twice their previous cloud bill on consultants and contractors to bring it back in, they can’t get the skilled staff, still waiting on hardware, mis-configured their security.

    CIO is now working on other things - like how to reduce headcount. Let’s put more out on the cloud…

    1. Guy de Loimbard Silver badge

      Re: Cycle in, cycle out

      That's classic, look at the money as the problem, i.e. we want more, or the shareholders do etc., the never ending chase of growth/profit at all costs means anything that appears to demonstrate savings, or better margins will be laser focussed upon.

      The standard approach is always kill headcount and buy some new tech that "promises" to show savings......

  6. MTimC

    Why do ppl act before they understand the Problem, and the Solution?

    Is it the seniors not asking the right questions? or are vested interests hiding what's going on?

    1. DJO Silver badge

      Why the "or"? It's both and more besides.

      As for why do people react too soon. A mixture of cowardice, peer-pressure, gullibility, over-confidence, the desire to be seen to be "dynamic", short-termism and so on and so on.....

    2. John Miles

      Re: Why do ppl act before they understand the Problem, and the Solution?

      I suspect they think they understand the problem and they have a solution to the problem - what they haven't realised, as in all life, is the problem and solutions are much more complex and they'd really don't want to listen to any "trouble makers" who disagree.

      To paraphrase a quote about teaching a group - Before you deal with the troublesome person, just think they may be the only one listening.

      1. Guy de Loimbard Silver badge

        Re: Why do ppl act before they understand the Problem, and the Solution?

        Before you deal with the troublesome person, just think they may be the only one listening.

        Very good point John Miles.

        I've never looked at from that angle before and may be something I'll consider when it arises next, in any context.

        1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

          Re: Why do ppl act before they understand the Problem, and the Solution?

          More poetic version: it's the grit in the oyster that produces the pearl.

    3. 0laf Silver badge
      Facepalm

      Ah the error in your thinking is that you don't see the same problem as they do.

      You see a large techological and operation shift which requires investment in development and skills to generate savings from a new platform.

      In reality thare are layers of other people problems which are nothing to do with tech which lead businesses to make stupid decision. Almost all are cultural issues.

      Shareholders tell board - get your fucking stock price up over the next 8 quarters or well cut off your bonus and your balls.

      The board look around for something to get stock prices up see a brochure for cloud stuff that implies they can pay off half the IT department within 2yr, and this will pump stock values through cost savings.

      They call manglement - get your shit in the cloud, all of it. Then dump the IT deprtment. You've got 18 months.

      Manglement call IT - We've got a new cloud first strategy, get all our shit in the cloud within a year and i don't fucking care how you do it. No, there is no budget.

      IT shrug their shoulders, mutter on El Reg about inevitable disasters and update their CVs

  7. 0laf Silver badge
    Holmes

    Wow

    Who'd have thought manglement would just jump on a bandwagon labelled "cloud first"?

    Maybe because it gave them a nice buzzword reply when the even higher manglement asked what their "cloud strategy" was, and because they fall for the glossy pictures ignoring the small print that says "you need to spend money to change things to get value from this".

    Not to worry because AI will provide yet another bandwagon/strategy buzzword for them to sound clever about. If they are lucky they'll have retired before that blow up too.

  8. This post has been deleted by its author

  9. trevorde Silver badge

    Cloud lock-in

    As soon as you rely on some proprietary AWS/MS functionality, you're locked in and it's difficult to leave, even to another cloud provider

    1. spireite Silver badge

      Re: Cloud lock-in

      I keep arguing this.

      Conversation runs like...

      Moving on-prem SQL to Azure- we'll save money.... ha, yea right

      Want to get data in it? Use ADF - while the rest of us want to be agnostic - Aitflow/Prefect/Mage etc... to avoid that lockin

      Of course, after a few years, moving from Azure (or any other cloud) back to on-prem - or to a competing cloud is damn night impossible, or very costly.

  10. trevorde Silver badge

    Not utility computing

    I went on both AWS and MS cloud courses at a previous job. Both trainers were keen to sell the idea of 'utility computing' ie as easily interchangeable as switching your electricity provider. It's relatively straightforward to write code which is portable across clouds but any non-trivial app requires a heap of config which is inherently non-portable.

  11. sabroni Silver badge

    If you require massive scalability

    The idea that "cloud" is bad and "on prem" is good is simplistic and normally shows that you haven't used much cloud stuff.

    There are definitely a ton of gotchas with third party clouds, and billing is the bit you have to watch the closest, but there are businesses that only exist because they run on the cloud and didn't have to pay for the infrastructure to host locally. Likewise there are businesses that run so much stuff all the time that it makes sense for them to have in house infrastructure.

    Cloud is just another tool, if you have massive fluctuations in throughput it can be the most cost effective solution.

    Cost is not the only thing to consider, but it is a massive part of whether a business is viable.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: If you require massive scalability

      There is nothing new in cloud potentially being a good thing. But unless your developments are cloud native from the outset you need to do some work to transform your on-prem systems into something cloud suitable. And as usual no management was happy to pay for the work to be done because pay now save later seems to be a complete anathema in business. They just wanted lift and shift to demonstrate they'd fulfilled the cloud buzzsword for their managment masters.

      So their CPU efficient servers (i.e. 100% load, 100% of the time) were dropped into cloud, and shockaroony it cost them a fortune

  12. 9Rune5

    I have questions

    Although I love big iron and the noise coming from angry fans venting dozens of sweating CPUs stuck inside racks filling a big room, there is one thing that keeps me from yearning back to on-premise compute.

    Namely: software infrastructure. As a developer I find myself having access to nice bits like e.g. a place to store my secrets, not that I have many secrets now, because these days my services have their own service account (or managed identity) with its own finely-grained roles defined. I can easily scale up (or down) as needed. My database instance is always running the latest version; no more discussions on whether or not to upgrade a 6 year old DBMS that receives a big fat nought in upgrades. My cloud DBMS can do a point in time recovery since someone knows how to do proper backups of its transaction logs.

    I'm guessing larger organizations have people who knows how to do all of this on-premise (and do it well).

  13. Alpy

    Hopefully the awakening has begun!

    The realisation is starting to dawn on people. Public cloud only works when its agile, open, interoperable with other cloud vendors and obviously cost effective. Public cloud today doesn't do this. Hybrid (mutlicloud, public/private) cloud is genuinely the only way organisations are going to get a real option.

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