SWS Snippet #0036: What Do You Lose When You Abandon the Cloud by Charles Humble

The main reason one starts to think about a move back to own data centres is the money. But there are also latency issues or security and compliance concerns which can be the cause to question your cloud setup.

One important point to consider is that „spending moves from upfront CAPEX (buying new machines in anticipation of success) to OPEX (paying for additional servers on demand)“.

Another one is that you need qualified personnel which runs your data centres. Also, you yourself are responsible to keep the data secure and avoid breaches. The ability to quickly change things or scale up or down is also limited, as you have to add new hardware to your data centres which can take days or even weeks when in a cloud it’s only one click away.

This was the reason for Zynga going back in the cloud after they moved to on-premise in 2011 and cut their costs by 2/3. After three to four years they had to renew their 40.000 instances, but many specialists already left the company. The main point for the move was the ability to innovate faster in the cloud than on their local instances.

Another one mentioned in the article is that hosting in the cloud can often be better for the environment. As many companies have to look at their environmental footprint, this is another important aspect.

All in all, this was a very interesting article to read.
For more information, read the full article here: https://thenewstack.io/what-do-you-lose-when-you-abandon-the-cloud/