Cloud is not always the answer
I only just came across this article the other day and found it very interesting not just for the article itself but for all the comments.
You can pick cloud evangelists and those who work for the big three cloud providers a mile away.
I do find it amazing how worked up people get over this debate and personally find IT tech pros now fitting into two categories with this.
You have the die hard cloud evangelists / cloud providers who are stubbornly holding to the "ra ra cloud" catch cry and refuse to be convinced otherwise.
You then have the IT pros who yes, still work with on prem kit but who have the skills to know how to mesh solutions all together.
For the cloud evangelists who think the cloud is going to feed every starving child in the world and going to bring forth unicorns and rainbows all day everyday, just take a breath.
Yes, the cloud does have it's advantages and has shaken the industry up.
However, to say that public cloud is cheaper and more secure than on premise is just plain wrong.
There are WAY too many examples of cloud bill shock now and look at the exponentially growing rates of cloud repatriation because of it.
AWS and Azure have cloud economics that are so bloody confusing and extensive that most of their own staff don't even understand them.
They also don't care for helping customers optimise the costs as it doesn't help their profit margins - "oh well, you consumed this service now cough up" is really becoming tiresome for a lot of customers.
I am seeing this is my region all the way from SMB up until the top companies - it's not limited to a particular environment size.
At least people with decent on premise technical skills can help mesh on prem environments with public cloud for decent hybrid environments or even build public cloud only environments as they have the technical fundamentals understood.
I consider myself cloud pragmatic and if a public cloud service for a customer with the right use case makes sense, then awesome - use it.
It should be another tool in the box and used as such.
I am sure people here remember when Gartner 10+ years ago was predicting most workloads and data were going to be in the cloud by the 2020s.
How wrong was that?
I would love to know the payday Gartner had for skewing that market research for AWS and Azure.
I do recognise cloud can be very effective with workloads that can be spun up and down dynamically as needed and even better, removed quickly when no longer required.
Then you are very likely going to see financial benefit.
However considering a number of workloads these day need 24x7 availability, I'm sorry but if it's not SaaS and some PaaS offerings, it doesn't add up cost wise.
I also don't buy into the myth that cloud is way more secure.
Sure - the cloud vendors invest a lot into security but look at the size of their environments.
The attack surface is so vast, I refuse to believe that have every entry point covered.
Also considering public cloud API is becoming one of the most common attack vectors as well (some global security analysts have this as THE number one attack vector) that does start to take the gloss of this shiny solution.
Also look at the cross tenancy vulnerabilities that Azure and AWS uncovered last year.
Again they will tell you we got to them before hostile actors but I pose the question - did they?
We all know that very smart hostile attackers will breach, see if they were detected and if not, stay in for very long periods of time.
They will be very patient and meticulously plan when they will strike and how.
Do we have sleepers sitting inside AWS / Azure just waiting for the right time?
I use cloud, albeit sparingly (moreso after the LastPass hack), within my own company and will use it where it makes sense.
However, I don't think I will ever recommend to a customer to go 100% public cloud but if it's the right tool for the right job, go for it.
I also predict within the next 5 years or so , one of these providers is going to be so crippled by a massive multi regional, global hack that will have such far reaching implications, that the cloud industry will be shaken to the core.
My two cents worth :)