Groups | Search | Server Info | Keyboard shortcuts | Login | Register [http] [https] [nntp] [nntps]

Groups > alt.comp.os.windows-10 > #181062

Are rainy days ahead for cloud computing?

Cross-posted to 5 groups.

Show all headers | View raw

This year, software firm 37signals will see a profit boost of more than 
$1m (Ł790,000) from leaving the cloud.

“To be able to get that with such relatively modest changes to our 
business is astounding,” says co-owner and chief technology officer, David 
Heinemeier Hansson.

The US company has millions of users for its online project management and 
productivity software, including Basecamp and Hey.

Like many companies it outsourced data storage and computing to a third 
party firm, a so-called cloud services provider.

They own huge data centres, where they host data from other firms, which 
can be accessed over the internet.

In 2022, such services cost 37signals $3.2m.

“Seeing the bill on a weekly basis really radicalised me,” Mr Heinemeier 
Hansson says.

"I went: ‘Wait! What are we spending for a week of rentals?’ I could buy 
some really powerful computers just on one week’s worth of [cloud] 
spending.”

So, he did. Buying hardware and hosting it in a shared data centre costs 
$840,000 per year.

Although costs pushed Mr Heinemeier Hansson to act, other factors were 
also a concern.

The internet is engineered to be highly resilient.

“I saw the distributed design erode as more and more companies gravitated 
essentially to three owners of computers,” he says, referring to the three 
leading cloud providers.

If a major data centre goes down, large parts of the web can go offline.

The cloud was pitched, he says, as cheaper, easier, and faster. “The cloud 
was not able to make things easier to a point where we could measure any 
productivity gains,” he says, noting his operations team has always been 
about the same size.

Was using the cloud faster?

“Yes, but it didn’t matter," says Mr Heinemeier Hansson.

"If you want to connect a hundred servers to the internet, you can do it 
in less than five minutes [in the cloud]. That’s incredible.

"But we do not need, nor do I believe the vast majority of companies need, 
a five-minute turnaround on a massive number of additional servers.”

He can have new servers delivered and racked in his data centre in a week, 
which is fast enough.

37signals does use the cloud for experimenting with new products. “We 
needed to have some big machines, but we only needed them for 20 minutes,” 
Mr Heinemeier Hansson says.

“The cloud is ideal for that. It would be wasteful to buy that computer 
and let it stay idle for 99.99% of the time.”

He still recommends the cloud to fledgling businesses. “When you have a 
speculative start-up and there’s great uncertainty as to whether you’re 
going to be around in 18 months, you should absolutely not spend your 
money buying computers,” he says. “You should rent them.”

37signals is not alone in bringing workloads back from the cloud, which is 
known as cloud repatriation.

Citrix, a company that provides software that enables employees to access 
their work applications over the internet, found that 94% of large US 
organisations it surveyed had worked on repatriating data or workloads 
from the cloud in the last three years.

Citrix is part of the Cloud Software Group, which also includes companies 
that provide networking hardware and software, and cloud management 
software.

The reasons cited included security concerns, unexpected costs, 
performance issues, compatibility problems and service downtime.

Plitch provides software that enables people to modify single-player 
games, including adjusting the difficulty.

It built its own private data centres and repatriated cloud workloads to 
them, saving an estimated 30% to 40% in costs after two years.

“A key factor in our decision was that we have highly proprietary R&D data 
and code that must remain strictly secure,” says Markus Schaal, managing 
director at the German firm.

“If our investments in features, patches, and games were leaked, it would 
be an advantage to our competitors. While the public cloud offers security 
features, we ultimately determined we needed outright control over our 
sensitive intellectual property.

"As our AI-assisted modelling tools advanced, we also required 
significantly more processing power that the cloud could not meet within 
budget.”

He adds: “We encountered occasional performance issues during heavy usage 
periods and limited customisation options through the cloud interface. 
Transitioning to a privately-owned infrastructure gave us full control 
over hardware purchasing, software installation, and networking optimized 
for our workloads.”

Mark Turner, chief commercial officer at Pulsant, helps companies to 
migrate from the cloud to Pulsant’s colocation data centres across the UK.

In a colocation arrangement the client owns the IT hardware, but houses it 
with another firm, where it can be kept securely, at the right temperature 
and with power back-up.

“The cloud is going to continue to be the biggest part of IT 
infrastructure, but there is a good place for local, physical, secure 
infrastructure,” he says. “There is a repatriation going on of the things 
that should never have been in the cloud or that won’t work in the cloud.”

Some his biggest clients for repatriation are online software providers, 
where each additional customer puts more load on the server, increasing 
cloud costs.

One such client is LinkPool, which enables smart contracting using 
blockchain. It was developed in public cloud, initially using free 
credits. Business exploded, and the cloud bill reached $1m per month. 
Using colocation, costs shrunk by up to 85%.

“[The founder has] now got four racks in a data centre in the city where 
he lives and works, connected to the world. He goes up against his 
competitors and he can move his price point around because his cost is not 
going to move in line [with customer demand],” says Mr Turner.

“The change leaders in the IT industry are now the people who are not 
saying cloud first, but are saying cloud when it fits,” he adds. “Five 
years ago, the change disruptors were cloud first, cloud first, cloud 
first.”

Of course, not everyone is repatriating. Cloud computing will remain an 
enormous business, with AWS, Microsoft's Azure and Google Cloud Platform 
being the biggest players.

For firms like Expedia, they are essential.

It has used the cloud to consolidate 70 petabytes of travel data from its 
21 brands.

Applications run in the cloud, too, except for legacy software that 
doesn’t work there yet.

“We are experts in travel,” says Rajesh Naidu, chief architect and senior 
vice president, Expedia. “[Cloud providers] are experts in running 
infrastructure. That's one less thing for me to worry about while we focus 
on running our business.”

“One of the main things the cloud gives us is a global presence, the 
ability to deploy our solutions closer to the region that they need to be 
in,” he says.

“The other thing is the resiliency and the availability of the 
infrastructure. Cloud providers have designed and architected their 
infrastructure really well. We can ride on the coattails of their 
innovation.”

Expedia has a cloud centre of excellence, which saved about 10% on cloud 
costs last year.

“You've got to set policies because otherwise it's easy for companies to 
run huge cloud costs,” Mr Naidu says. “You can turn things down when you 
don't need them. If you consume [cloud resources] wisely, your bill won't 
be a surprise at the end of the day.”

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd114lllyp6o

Back to alt.comp.os.windows-10 | Previous | Next — Next in thread | Find similar | Unroll thread

Thread

Are rainy days ahead for cloud computing? "Dell / EMC suck" <dell-emc-suck@dell.com> - 2024-12-31 02:00 +0100
  Re: Are rainy days ahead for cloud computing? T <T@invalid.invalid> - 2024-12-31 21:46 -0800

csiph-web