anyone else getting tired of explaining why we can't just use cloud for everything
Posted by Sroni4967@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 242 comments
had three meetings this week where management suggested moving our entire on-prem infrastructure to aws because 'it would be simpler and cheaper'
Bubby_Mang@reddit
Guys, CEO here, just dropping in to give you all some perspective you might not have.
Have you tried using AI?
RavenWolf1@reddit
Yes, I tried it and it deleted all our files and backups in 9 seconds!
harrywwc@reddit
Well, that's certainly faster and more efficient than a human would have done ;)
injury@reddit
But just think of the shifting of blame and liability that could be accomplished
lenswipe@reddit
oh that'll still happen. it'll be anyone's fault but management
Pah-Pah-Pah@reddit
What do you mean? You guys don’t always blame the CIO that was just fired?
DonL314@reddit
But he got a severance package of $38 million, that poor man
AmusingVegetable@reddit
Can I be your next CEO? My severance package is $32M, you’ll be saving $6M!
Be fiscally responsible and pick me.
DonL314@reddit
Too late. We found a $48M guy who has bankrupted 4 other companies - so he has a lot of experience!
lenswipe@reddit
Companies: Sorry we can't hire you because you only have 9.5 years of experience and we need 10
Also companies: My golfing buddy here has bankrupted the last 4 companies he worked at and wants a pay package that's more than the entire payroll put together.....we should hire him!
lenswipe@reddit
Dang, we should make him president
Pah-Pah-Pah@reddit
Big brain on Brad here. What a deal!
lenswipe@reddit
🤣😂 too accurate
injury@reddit
Oh Im sure, your comment just kind of made me realize it. If ChatGPT has control, and an oops happens, all the easier to blame it.
beren12@reddit
That’s great as the business folds and is sued.
daedalusprospect@reddit
Hey man look, I can only load up each page of EC2s resources as fast as it will let me.
SAugsburger@reddit
Lol... A human we would have to wait for somebody to fat finger it. The AI deleted production quickly.
ShakespearianShadows@reddit
CEO: In the old days, I could fire someone over that. Is there an AI that I could blame for the failure, fire, and then spin up a new agent of itself so I could fire it again during the next scandal?
pizzacake15@reddit
We can now replace blaming interns with blaming AI!
lenswipe@reddit
obviously you were holding it wrong. try using more AI and prompting better /s
AYF_Amph@reddit
What about.. and stay with me for a second… Cloud AI?
Bubby_Mang@reddit
...mother of god.
yrogerg123@reddit
What if I told you the cloud is just somebody else's computer and cloud AI is a fuckload of somebody else's computers
Stonewalled9999@reddit
CEO wouldn't get it
daedalusprospect@reddit
They do, except they see it as computers that they and the company didnt buy, so it must be cheaper
jmeador42@reddit
He is the Chosen One!
beren12@reddit
;-)
Accomplished-Fly-975@reddit
Thank you sir! This just made my skin crawl as I'm in the middle of replacing the entire networking stack because of Claude AI, upper-management's shenanigans and hundreds of TB of data being blasted through switches and AP's in a matter of seconds (the time unit could be wrong, as network monitoring was flooded with TBs of SNMP data prior to it's shutdown). Just because it can spit out code that would make me choke an intern does not mean it should bypass IT reviewing it. Yeah, I know, I know, Claude != Cloud, but it's mighty close. Thank you very much!
1z1z2x2x3c3c4v4v@reddit
Wait... this Claude AI:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1sxe7cf/claudepowered_ai_coding_agent_deletes_entire/
LOL
beren12@reddit
THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER.
JerryRiceOfOhio2@reddit
co-located cloud AI as a service?
IAmSnort@reddit
I have replicated my cloud AI in blockchain.
gdj1980@reddit
I quit. I'm done. No more.
jimmyandrews@reddit
Hang in there... Clouds are in the "sky" and AI tools need a "net"work.
TheVillage1D10T@reddit
You can take a more synergistic approach when you use cloud based AI…or some other stupid bullshit buzzword salad.
Rivia@reddit
Cloud AI?
denmicent@reddit
Me rn at this revelation
OCAU07@reddit
I got pulled in to the CEO's office be told we are pulling in 3rd party to advise where we can use AI in our Ag business.
What problem are we trying to solve I asked? "Oh, we just need an AI assessment done"
I put forward a business case for automation at one of our site that would see a 5 fogure revenue uplift and a ROI of 3 years based on actual data that was rejected. Mind blown
halford2069@reddit
always hilarious in IT how management will listen to some here today gone tommorow blow ins but ignore internal staff actually dealing with the systems…
OCAU07@reddit
It's so frustrating. I keep coming back to the same question, what problem are we trying to solve?
Work with me and articulate the issue, then we can find a solution.
Bright_Arm8782@reddit
The amount of people who can't answer the question "What are we trying to accomplish by this activity?" is scary.
Like everyone is going through the motions without understanding what they are doing.
Rentun@reddit
To play devil's advocate here, if they knew the answer to that question, they wouldn't need a consultant.
Sometimes people bring in consultants to answer the question "how do I make more money", which is ridiculously broad and sometimes requires an outside perspective. Businesses are totally fine with blowing a bunch of money on the off chance that some random consultant has a novel idea they can use.
Bright_Arm8782@reddit
"How do I make more money?" is an example of someone who does know what they are trying to achieve, but not the best way to do it.
AmusingVegetable@reddit
99% of all the money blown on consultants could be saved if you just asked the grunts about their problems and asked them for a solution.
Bright_Arm8782@reddit
Distant wisdom that you pay for is better than the wisdom of those under you.
After all, you're supposed to be cleverer than them, that's why you're the boss. /s
OCAU07@reddit
It's the push to cloud all over again but on another level.
I've managed to temper it continually asking that very question. We have identified areas in finance where we will see efficiencies but need to define and pilot the solution rather than just AI it all
MetalSufficient9522@reddit
We don't know the problem yet, until we see a solution for it.
halford2069@reddit
yep
unfortunately the referral to blow in consultants instead of the internal teans who know the domain well -> happened frequently at nearly every job i had.
Bagel-luigi@reddit
They do love the snake oil salesmen
AmusingVegetable@reddit
It’s your fault for not fudging the numbers to at least 4 million. Can’t ask for money is it’s not in the millions.
yrogerg123@reddit
Your problem is you used the word "automation" instead of "AI"
OCAU07@reddit
I actually used machine learning thinking it was enough of a buzz word, I clearly misread the power of Facebook influence.
ziobrop@reddit
linkedin.
Nothing influences the C-suite more then random linkedin posts.
yrogerg123@reddit
Idiot c-levels don't know what the fuck machine learning means
CaseClosedEmail@reddit
Should have mentioned you leveraged AI to do it
another_mouse@reddit
Automation was the buzzword 3+ cycles ago. You could s/automation/ai and they would go for it.
sgt_Berbatov@reddit
Do it again, but this time start if off with "ChatKFC said..."
buds4hugs@reddit
Did you wine & dine the folks that you shared your business case to first? Maybe kick them some personal incentives to buy into your plan?
forgottenmy@reddit
The good news is that if you feed that data to the AI and give it the right prompt, it will tell him that it was you that came up with the same case. Or just imbed your name and some AI encouragement into the meta data of your business case.
Cyali@reddit
Gods, I physically cringed 😂
Fritzo2162@reddit
CTO here - I’m going to ask my team to use AI to design our cloud infrastructure so it’s done right. I’ll text them on my BlackBerry right now.
Ok-River-6810@reddit
CEO here too.
I am currently building my own cloud with AI and will soon move our company to it.
MeatSuzuki@reddit
Genius! Get this man his bonus!
Hi_Im_Ken_Adams@reddit
No no no, you need to try REBOOTING first, then AI !!
viral-architect@reddit
Lmfao
Lucky__Flamingo@reddit
What an insight! Thank heavens for those AI-written in flight mags, or our company would completely lack direction.
accidentalciso@reddit
Thanks, now I have to wipe up coffee off my monitor and keyboard. I needed a good laugh, though.
clbw@reddit
Hey no disrespect but stick to the subject. Expand on why CEO, CTO thing the cloud is as good as sliced bread
TuxAndrew@reddit
But we host our own cloud and AI nowadays
Greed_Sucks@reddit
Genius! Here’s a 30 million bonus.
Bad_Idea_Hat@reddit
The app "CloudToButt" pivots to "AItoButt", makes millions.
Pyrostasis@reddit
Love that call out.
I have a brand new startup in India that utilizes AI for all of your OCR and document management needs. We can literally import all of your emails, categorize and store them, seamlessly push to your CMS, and handle all of your customer interactions so you can focus on the real thing!
Its going to be great!
/s for those who need it.
yrogerg123@reddit
Man do I feel dumb. No wonder you get paid the GDP of an island nation and I have to commute 2 hrs each way just to afford childcare.
Internet-of-cruft@reddit
Worthless peon here, just dropping in to give you some perspective.
dev_all_the_ops@reddit
Not sure if I should upvote because funny, or downvote because its true and makes me mad.
FactMuch6855@reddit
Wtf is going on here? Anyone saying cloud is less expensive and more reliable without several caveats is a liar.
hihcadore@reddit
Well… id argue it can be more reliable.
A geographical redundant vm across 4 zones is even hurricane or nuke proof.
But its cost as much as 3 senior engineers haha
nerobro@reddit
Buf it something goes wrong, you can't do a thing about it, it's easier to explain, but if it really needs to be up saying "aws outage" doesn't make your production come back. Having geographically redundant systems isn't exactly hard. And if you can afford to have "minimal" stuff elsewhere. Or.. you can pay to have your backups ALSO be VM images taht can be spun up if the fertilizer hits the ventilator.
Frothyleet@reddit
I can go from zero to having an app deployed and backed up across multiple continents in a few minutes with any of the hyperscalers. With one person and a credit card.
Doing the same thing on traditional infrastructure, with similar levels of resiliency? Scoping out colos and IXs and deploying hardware? Before we even get to the software side of the infrastructure...
That's the difference. That's the value proposition of the hyperscalers.
And realistically, there are plenty of situations where you can't "do anything" with your own infrastructure.
mrkirukiru@reddit
That's a good thing. You can blame AWS for outages and issues. It's like what CEOs do with consultants, when some shit hits the fan they blame the consultants for giving bad strategy advice.
binkbankb0nk@reddit
But that's just being a bad employee. It makes your job easier but its certainly not looking for the best availability for the business.
mrkirukiru@reddit
your company will lay you off to save 5$ with AI or outsourced candidates. Nobody cares about the best availability for the business. You do what is best for you. That is the entire point of politics in the workplace.
beren12@reddit
And then the company is out of business.
nerobro@reddit
Aaaand here's the disconnect. If the company is valuable, and values you, that answer is trash. If it's a typical large company, having a finger to point is an ass saving measure.
mrkirukiru@reddit
You can be valuable while blaming AWS… I can setup IaC to immediately deploy multiple new servers or VPCs in minutes whereas traditional on prem requires days/weeks. And if it stops working I can also troubleshoot but it’s always nice to have someone to blame as a backup… basically doing the work of a sysadmin, network engineer and security engineer all at once. If I ever fuck up I can blame AWS as well even if it isn’t their fault but the C suite isn’t technical enough to know that lol. No matter what having aws to blame is awesome. You the type of dude that also thinks having on prem exchange is also better? Bro the days of managing mail servers are a nightmare having Microsoft to blame is awesome when email goes down. Print servers too. Honestly if I was a startup I would always go full cloud , way easier to scale and once costs are crazy then move some stuff on prem but there will always be a cloud presence and make it hybrid at worst.
billy_teats@reddit
You need multi cloud. When azure or aws decide to nuke their own orchestration system or bring down 3/4 of US storage you can still lose uptime. It generally doesn’t happen at the same time between providers though
DFLDrew@reddit
Not less expensive, but definitely reliable and scalable.
PlayStationPlayer714@reddit
Any decent cloud service is, by default, more reliable and resilient than what most businesses are running themselves. Which is exactly why it’s usually an order of magnitude more expensive like-for-like. The only people that say it’s cheaper are the new c-suite because by the time anyone catches on, they’re already gone.
andecase@reddit
Or people who don't seem to understand that signing a 2 to 3-year contract for a very cheap price means that they're just going to jack it up at the end of that.
We recently got a 5y contract for ERP for the same price as on prem. I told my boss it will probably double or more when that is up, we aren't big enough to negotiate that again. He doesn't believe me.
Hashrunr@reddit
This hit us HARD. We went all in for a LIMS SaaS solution with a 3yr contract for the provider to host it. We had an option to host it ourselves for the same setup cost + our server expenses, but it sounded too good to be true so senior execs signed off for the vendor hosted model. The renewal is 10x and a migration to our servers would be 10x the initial setup cost + billed vendor engineer hours. It's just a pair of Windows app servers and SQL servers behind a load balancer, but we have no ability to migrate without the vendor.
andecase@reddit
Yeah, I hope we aren't in that big of trouble if we decide to move off when it's renewal time. In theory this cloud migration would make the operations/process side easier to move back due to all of the cleanup we have to do. That's assuming the vendor will let us pull our data out in a easy to use format. I doubt we will get a nice and tidy DB/log file to mount in a new SQL server.
If I'm being fair, there are a lot of factors outside of cost that are are causing us to move to the SAS version of our ERP. Boss, CFO, etc. were 50-50 for staying until we got that quote. I was fully against. The reasons are mostly culture shifts, and having an excuse to step on some specific departments toes, but I'm a server admin not ERP Admin so my opinion didn't go very far.
In the end my job gets easier for now. I don't have to deal with their shitty platform anymore. I'm purely infra, so it's just a few less finicky highly critical servers to manage for me.
Hashrunr@reddit
The kick to my balls is our vendor is hosting the SaaS app on AWS and I originally proposed we simply host it on our AWS tenant. Now the migration cost is what it is and I can't control it. It's just 4 EC2 instances, 2 app servers and 2 SQL servers behind a load balancer.
bondguy11@reddit
I can tell you from working at a Fortune 500 company, they moved everything to the cloud so they could us out of our redundant datacenters which required teams of people to manage (network, server, storage) they got everything into the cloud then fired 90% of the 100 person IT group (including the entire CLOUD team) and sent all the work to India for a company called Infosys to manage.
Once your shit is in the cloud and working, you can hire the cheapest bidder to manage it and maintain it, at least for a while.
They talked about how moving to the cloud would give them faster deployment and save money. Legit the only money saved was in offshoring all of the high paying Americans getting salary and benefits in exchange for Indians who make 500$ a month through a 3rd party. These people have NO idea what they are doing, takes them 10x longer to do anything compared to internet IT, higher ups couldn’t give a shit. As long as the IT infrastructure keeps working they seriously don’t care about the quality or speed of the work.
randomlyme@reddit
Sell the sizzle not the steak
hymie0@reddit
... or a cloud salesman.
Captain_Swing@reddit
Like he said, liar.
loupgarou21@reddit
It's almost certainly not cheaper. My go-to with these questions is to figure out what the cost and timeline to migrate would be, and the ongoing costs to the company. I usually don't have to go down this path all that far because cloud gets expensive quickly
1z1z2x2x3c3c4v4v@reddit
Just show the estimated bill... it will definitely NOT be cheaper than on-prem, capitalized over 5 years.
mixduptransistor@reddit
I mean we have zero servers on prem and have everything in Azure, so you're kind of starting from a nonsensical premise, as if everyone here would agree that you can't go completely to the cloud
I'll be the first to say it's not for everyone, and the tradeoffs are different for every company and what the priorities are but if you aren't evaluating constantly what is actually best, and just "cloud bad, servers good" you might be the problem
binkbankb0nk@reddit
There is nothing wrong with this but:
1. If Azure is down, there is absolutely nothing you can do if you are somehow implying you dont have offline backups of your systems.
2. That doesn't mean it is any cheaper than an equally secure, performant, and highly-available hybrid solution.
Typically, if the cost can be had then best option to get 2 of those 3 is to have hybrid.
Ketalon1@reddit
We have a in house developed piece of software that everyone in the company (including myself) has to use. Now if we were to cloud host that, it'll slow everything down. I mean everything, its not optimized for the cloud. Plus an entire department needs a 10 gig fiber run from their machine to the server to export very large files (100+ gigs) Nah we cant cloud host everything. Plus as the lead systems engineer, I like on prem ADDS. If we loose internet for whatever reason, people can still log in.
progenyofeniac@reddit
Job security: move it all to the cloud, then move it all back. Then start over again with the next CEO!
Monomette@reddit
Sounds like something the BoFH would do.
Each CEO went into the basement and then nobody saw them again?
yrogerg123@reddit
I just shutdown and E-cycled 5 racks of servers at one of our sites because we are cloud-first. And now we are moving in and racking up 5 racks of servers at the same site.
Fuck it I just do what I'm told
khantroll1@reddit
Bro, I’m about to start this cycle. I got a boss who knows nothin about the cloud, but has decided we can move all of our storage to the cloud, yet still insists we need a hybrid architecture.
I’m like…”uh, but boss, if we’re a 365 shop, an our app integrations are in the cloud, an our storage is in the cloud…you aren’t doing anything but making it harder to manage user accounts.”
“Redundancy! Best practice!” He say….
Yeah…gonna be moving this stuff back on prem is a year.
beren12@reddit
Where do you work, I’ll e-cycle those racks of servers for ya. I’ll do it cheap even.
khantroll1@reddit
Man, I’d take your information except we are required to keep our e-waste pretty much forever.
They aren’t even allowed to leave the premises. Can’t even go to a storage unit.
beren12@reddit
Wow, that’s a pretty dumb business decision honestly
khantroll1@reddit
Yep. Some of it does I’m sure. Pretty much depends on who decommissioned it and possibly what purpose it served.
The policy obviously predates me. At some point, someone decided all electronics had to be kept because of the possibility of data recovery.
The C levels are even convinced people can recover data from ram that has been sitting in the store room unpowered for 20 years.
We finally got them to agree to let us get rid of monitors and other things that obviously can’t hold data.
That was in 2025.
We even keep printers.
beren12@reddit
Wow. Yeah they need to go to a reeducation camp. You can’t pull data off of anything if it’s been rewritten, let alone ram… and if they are still paranoid drive shredders exist.
But maybe someone can explain the value of the regained space, being “green” or at least the liability of having data at rest that could be stolen.
weekendclimber@reddit
This is the correct answer. Where I'm at, we've gone from Azure SQL data warehouses to a Synapse migration, then to Databricks, and I'm working now to migrate it all to Snowflake. I've only been here 2 years, lol. I've resignedyself to accepting that my resume is just going to HAVE to be more than one page.
Beefcrustycurtains@reddit
Helping build out databricks for a customer that went from synapse to fabric and now databricks. I only have to do the infra setup for it though.
sysacc@reddit
How is the move out of Fabric? I have heard it can be a real pain.
wbrd@reddit
ETL all the things!
TN_man@reddit
I don’t know if those are fake words
heretogetpwned@reddit
Anytime I talk to an AWS Consultant....
Allokit@reddit
"All words are made up"
-Thor Odinson
MaelstromFL@reddit
They should be, but they're not...
JerryRiceOfOhio2@reddit
don't worry, the new question that you'll get tired of is why can't AI do everything and give me all the money
Refurbished_Keyboard@reddit
"What analysis is the basis of the opinion that it would be cheaper?"
BemusedBengal@reddit
Well I had this great lunch with...
Mr_Fourteen@reddit
"I talked to this at this other place and they are doing this"
JonnyLay@reddit
That's how you get the price analysis duties.
lazyhustlermusic@reddit
I like the ‘is it, actually?’. Make them do a bunch of planning to prove themselves wrong lol
RumRogerz@reddit
I’ve been working in cloud exclusive environments for about 6 years now.
Cloud is not cheap. In the slightest. It’s good when you are working on products that are PaaS or SaaS where you need shit scaling at a moments notice, at extreme measures (like 6500 nodes)
Without giving out names, there was a certain grocer in Canada (where I live) that houses their apps in GCP. I was contracted to do some work on their kubernetes clusters. Their monthly costs were well over 1 million.
Cloud is not simple and it is not cheap.
ziobrop@reddit
lol there are 2. Sobeys or Loblaws.
Disgruntled_Smitty@reddit
It's easy around my parts, the front office sees the price and says we're good.
BoringLime@reddit
We moved ours fully to the cloud, three years ago. But it was very very very difficult and took a very long time to get the cost in line with our onprem setup. You basically have to relayout how all your various systems are architected, and combining wherever possible to minimize costs and wasted VM utilization. Then you have to cement it with cloud reservations that last a year or longer, to get that last little bit of cost.
We did ours thinking of it as a hypervisor lift and shift. But that was running close to 3x our onprem costs, initially. Lots of wasted vms barely getting used.
Leather-Arachnid-417@reddit
Yes yes and more yes. Had one yesterday about the damn security DVRs again. I get asked every year. "Well, just get Flock cameras" Ok dude, give me about 120k and Ill get you 4.
JonnyLay@reddit
You still have DVRs? There are lots of very affordable NVR options.
englandgreen@reddit
Actually you can use cloud for everything. It all depends on your individual company structure. In some cases it is more resilient, can have DR and BC built in but is rarely cheaper. Many companies these days are partially or fully remote, so cloud and SaaS makes sense in those scenario.
Phenergan_boy@reddit
Some businesses have regulatory and data sovereignty requirements that makes hosting everything in the cloud not possible.
mrhorse77@reddit
yep. I worked at a number of financial places and we couldnt store our data anywhere we didnt have 100% control over it.
so any cloud storage or servers we wanted or needed, we had to create ourselves.
JonnyLay@reddit
What country are you in? And what year was this?
I've worked for multiple financial sectors, in multiple countries, and for some multinational companies. They all did pretty much everything in the cloud.
TN_man@reddit
That’s unfortunate
Fyunculum@reddit
You can also use an abacus for everything if you've got the time...
There is one and only one valid reason to move everything to the cloud.
Because it makes good business sense for your specific use case.
Any reason that is not this reason is a lie.
JonnyLay@reddit
That's not a reason, that's a platitude. It's like saying "the only reason to do it is if it's better than not doing it."
MightBeDownstairs@reddit
100% the Cloud is the way to go. DR and BC is worth the premium
adam_dup@reddit
Which isn't built in, you need to design for this. Same as on prem
MightBeDownstairs@reddit
Procedural yes. Configure parameters and done.
Fyunculum@reddit
lolwut
zeptillian@reddit
What do you mean geo replication is not a backup?
LOL
hymie0@reddit
I'm just one data point, but at two of my last three jobs, it was "the cloud is too slow and inefficient, bring it back on site."
TN_man@reddit
How is the cloud slow? I’m honestly confused.
hymie0@reddit
Typically, it's the comparative network lag between connecting to "a computer in the closet" vs "a computer in South Carolina."
Lonely_Assignment_14@reddit
Last time i had a team say that it turned out they were doing 4 dozen round trips per request and their app was designed like shit.
GuestHistorical6880@reddit
Cloud admin here. Why so afraid of cloud? There are 1000 ways to skin a cat, usually just takes a little bit of research to find the actual correct solution to be cost effective. You cant just migrate your servers to cloud VMs and call it good, you actually have to learn and develop on top of a different platform.
We have been 100% cloud native for about 5 years now and it has saved a ton of money and time. No more patch tuesday scarries trying to update domain controllers, praying our data center stays online over the holidays, or chasing down remote end users that havent connected to the vpn in a while. I think a lot of admins are just afraid that the cloud will downsize their team (it will), make their RHCE certs useless (it will), and make their edge networks they spent so much time building out feel redundant (it will).
Lonely_Assignment_14@reddit
My main peeve is when people say "it's just someone else's computers" like bruh no it's not. At all. The abstractions and apis it provides are night and day more powerful than what's available on prem and its easy to codify every aspect of the infra in one coherent offering.
Shayes_@reddit
ShakespearianShadows@reddit
No, I’m getting tired of explaining why we can’t use AI for everything.
Fritzo2162@reddit
Cloud infrastructure can be significantly more expensive. You have to get proper licensing, there are usually data egress costs, cloud workstations are insanely expensive, and there can be significant lag if you’re running database software from cloud servers to local clients.
It can work, but the solution is seldom cost efficient. Once higher-ups hear that, they’re back to “OK, back to a hybrid model.”
geryatric@reddit
To be fair I can’t remember the last time one of my customers had any on premise infrastructure. It’s definitely not cheaper - probably 2X the cost at least
skspoppa733@reddit
Cheaper in AWS LMAO.
TheJesusGuy@reddit
Lol.
Lmao, even.
Lazy_Owl987@reddit
Come on! We could keep the primary DBs live for only 30mins each and the DCs only need to be alive per auth token so they could be on for 1sec off for .5 secs... youre just being lazy you can script that!
Evil-Twin-Skippy@reddit
I'm an old man yelling at the Cloud...
But really there is no cloud. It's just someone else's computer.
jollybot@reddit
Just be honest and tell them Cloud won’t solve all of their problems…but moving everything to containers on k8s/Openshift definitely will.
czenst@reddit
Nope I have it a bit different because we actually are in cloud as we use IaaS provider and we run VMs and virtual networks but it is not AWS or Azure just a local provider.
Each time we have a new employee they don't understand cloud is not just Azure, AWS or GCP.
So I get mid level managers once a year trying to start "cloud migration, to be in real cloud" and not use VMs but deploy to PaaS, that I have to explain is not going to save us any money for our workloads.
While also at the same time "we are the cloud" because we provide SaaS solution.
No-Land-672@reddit
Interesting, my last six projects involved bringing cloud-migrated infrastructure (3 to 6 years old) back on-prem. I’m based in Europe, where on-prem is currently seeing a revival, partly due to concerns about sovereignty from US cloud providers.
Walbabyesser@reddit
Cloud is -in most cases- not even cheaper 🙄
Ok-Actuator9118@reddit
Management wanted network engineers/admins to be able to use eve-ng among other network emulation software. They wanted to use AWS.
I didn’t say not I simply asked for quotes from AWS and GCP
Cloud = $40k a month On-premises = $90k one time purchase
I would be the one managing the system regardless of cloud or on-prem so internal cost doesn’t change.
Pretty easy decision after they saw the numbers.
Tall-Geologist-1452@reddit
The differences in orgs.. where i work that is a rounding error.. My CIO would have been cool , give that to the AWS team.
kerrwashere@reddit
One internet outage stops the entire company from doing anything for a whole day. Have them experience that once and they will never ask that again
zeptillian@reddit
If your shit is on prem and your internet goes down, you probably won't be wokring either.
At least with cloud, if the internet get cut with a backhoe, you can tell your employees to WFH.
xgnarf@reddit
There's way more O360ish (or insert whatever other cloud service) outages than my office has lost internet connectivity. You can also bring in redundant ISPs or have a backup 5G connection if it's that important. There's nothing I can do to mitigate a cloud service outage.
Tall-Geologist-1452@reddit
You can’t stop “the cloud” from having an outage, but you can definitely plan for it. In an IaaS setup, that’s really part of the job, making sure you have backups, replication, and a way to fail over if something goes down. For example, you can set things up so your systems switch to another region if one has an issue. If you spread things out and use load balancing, you can even handle smaller problems without users noticing. It’s not cheap to build that level of reliability, but with the right planning...t it’s absolutely doable.
At a more advanced level, you can even set things up across multiple cloud providers, like having a backup environment in AWS. That’s more complex and expensive, but it gives you another safety net if a whole provider has problems.
All of this really comes down to business continuity, making sure things keep running and downtime stays as low as possible. So while you can’t prevent an outage, you can absolutely reduce how much it affects you.
kerrwashere@reddit
Theres tasks that can be completed without relying on internet access vs being completely SOL.
Working from home does work here but owning your infrastructure is more beneficial in multiple ways
AwhYissBagels@reddit
Usually when people say things like this to me I ask them something like “oh, how much cheaper? Can you show me your figures of how much out it will cost vs our current cost base?”.
999 times out of 1000 they haven’t even got a clue, so you can press them when they reveal that they don’t have any with questions like “so how do you know it’s cheaper?”.
redstarduggan@reddit
er, the sales guy account manager person says it will save money.
justice_works@reddit
Cos if the rain obviously.
Regular_Strategy_501@reddit
I work in medical IT in Germany. When people people tell me that we should cloud feature x, the answer is usually: Law says no.
Deruji@reddit
Ah ze verkers council
IntelligentTeam6290@reddit
netwalker0099@reddit
here's a set of articles that I like to point out whenever this discussion comes up. we have this discussion regularly with clients. the cloud is for people with workloads that can grow incredibly quickly or need to scale out incredibly fast. if you have a predictable workload and good security practices, normally a private data center makes a lot more sense. obviously there are different use cases for each scenario.
https://basecamp.com/cloud-exit
fdeyso@reddit
“Cheaper” LOL.
You pay for someone else’s computer and they bill for everything they can, just some examples from Azure that will catch most people off-guard:
VNet peering costs twice( billed per megabytes both ingress and egress on both VNets)
Do you like/need signinlogs over 7 days? MONEY, not much but still.
“Free services” while the service itself is not billed, the enrolled resources will have to enable a paid service on themselves so the “free service” can operate and that can easily eat your budget. (Ask me who enabled a free service that ended up costing £4500/month for ~100 devices)
randalzy@reddit
"we may have different meanings for cheaper"
(Which may be true, business are sometimes compelled to have as fewer things as they can, and may see services that cost much more money as cheaper overall by some obscure economical caballistic ritual they were taught in economics school-temples by their high priests and that responds to deep and hidden religious concepts or moon cycles or those fertility rituals in which they have to sacrifice 1000 interns, it's difficult to track sometimes).
But asking for graphs or projections of costs that include usage growth and arbitrary price rises, or effects like entire AWS zones being powered off for war, may be fun.
elpollodiablox@reddit
Cloud: "Move all of your data up here! No ingress cost!"
You: "Ok, now I want to get my data out."
Cloud (grimacing): "Ooooh... That's gonna cost you."
Lurksome-Lurker@reddit
At this point, I just roll with it and learn. Worst case scenario they were right, best case scenario, you get them to pay for certs to better facilitate the transition and then leverage that when they go broke
denbesten@reddit
Our previous CEO did that because it was "cheaper". Our current CEO is bringing it back from the cloud because that is cheaper. Consultants doing the work make money both times.
serunati@reddit
From the management/MBA perspective, an employee quitting will not break your infrastructure and hardware replacement becomes someone else’s problem.
Basically, a company sacrifices autonomy by transferring as much operational risk to cloud providers so they can survive people quitting. Also, they can fire their entire development and infrastructure employees 60 days before an IPO or private sale to make the company look more profitable.
Or the ultra-sleazy … filing bankruptcy and not owning any assets that creditors can actually liquidate…
It all comes down to transferring risk to someone else. In case you question it, look around the office and count how many contractors there are vs employees in certain functions. It takes nothing to fire a contractor that embarrasses a manager in a meeting. It takes a lot to fire employees.
doubleknocktwice@reddit
My company is big in the cloud. They say it's cheaper cause finance can cook the books more easily when it's in the cloud. I don't question it.
orion3311@reddit
Meanwhile: I KNOW OUR NETWORK DRIVE IS ONLY LIKE 80 GIG BUT WE NEEEED IT EVEN THOUGH WE HAVE TEAMS SHAREPOINT AND 3 CRM PLATFORMS THAT ALL STORE FILES
hankhillnsfw@reddit
The ultimate solution is a hybrid one. Leverage cloud where it’s best (ECS tasks are so cheap and cool), building “serverless” applications are also extremely useful and nice from a hygiene / tooling perspective. Etc.
OnPrem also makes sense for running a server or database.
Every rose has its thorn.
glyndon@reddit
It's a 'grass is greener' pendulum swing.
Just ask anyone who's already made the conversion, and then ask them when they predict they'll be switching back (if they haven't already).
Cloud is great for some things, but never for everything. Likewise for in-house.
Revolutionary_You_89@reddit
You should feed into it.
You know, you’re right! But for us to be truly safe with cloud we need multi cloud redundancy. So, we need our entire stack on AWS with its own georedundancy and high availability, plus the entire stack on Azure with the same!
After all, not your hardware and you don’t have control over it or what happens.
Biggest thing I’ve observed when companies move to a SaaS product or the cloud is: management doesn’t fully understand that regardless of the $800k/yr they pay for cloud, when it has issues or goes down there’s nothing their own teams can do. Furthermore, Microsoft and Amazon prioritise higher paying/value customers.
Surprised pikachu face when an outage happens and we can’t do anything due to being at Microsoft or Amazon’s mercy.
INSPECTOR99@reddit
'it would be simpler and cheaper' Ha HA, LOL, Ha HA, LoL, LOLOLOLOLOLOLLO, HA HA HA hA hA .
hkusp45css@reddit
We did the best of both worlds. We collocated our on prem stuff to a place where they manage the risk and infra and we just cut them a check.
So, our shit isn't in the cloud, or in the closet. It's "over there" and they have to fuck with it, rather than me.
Cheomesh@reddit
Why do they still pay you?
hkusp45css@reddit
Because our problems are more diverse than "keep the servers running"
metajames@reddit
If done right they are right.
SPMrFantastic@reddit
Had a few clients find this out the hard way after sales sold them on a cloud setup. As always we deal with the aftermath when the dream that's sold isn't the reality they get
Savage_Hams@reddit
I like the price argument. Especially when I point out people prefer to own a home than rent, often for more, forever.
Professional-Heat690@reddit
CapEx vs OpEx is all important to those who worship EBICTA, therefore share price.
mtgguy999@reddit
Why not just lease physical server moves it to opex
GX_EN@reddit
When I worked for a Nutanix partner MSP, that was effectively our top compute as a service model. If they wanted it in our co-lo, NP. If they wanted it in their co-lo, same. We managed it all for them and we went with dedicated clusters per customer. One price covered the entire stack and SDWAN if necessary. We also in general did not manage VMs at all. Though if they wanted us to do automated patching for them, we would as part of the SOW.
Side note - our first big customer that eventually did that with us first started out by having us manage their entire two data center Dell Nutanix infra as CDW was doing it before we did and they fucked it all up.
Initially it was just two of us trying to wrap our arms around the whole thing - 10 clusters, 60 nodes, etc. Was a challenge at first because literally zero best practices were being followed but we sorted it all out.
When their Dell shit was EOL, we leased them a shitload of Nutanix blocks, migrated everything to those running AHV and saved them a ton. This was before Broadcom started raking people over the coals, so they're probably very happy now.
DominusDraco@reddit
You should sell him on private cloud. You get a budget for the move AND you dont actually do anything different.
Ill-Barracuda9031@reddit
AWS will gladly provide funding and help. With the cloud experience you will command a larger salary.
penguinjunkie@reddit
You can literally move everything cloud. It’s just complicated and expensive
codewario@reddit
“because last time you told us to do that you balked at the sticker shock and made us stop”
At least where I work that would be the answer
billy_teats@reddit
You can’t just be up there and doing a balk like that
KindPresentation5686@reddit
The cloud is just somone else’s computer.
seanocaster40k@reddit
Sorry, i was using ai to explain why ai
RestartRebootRetire@reddit
The office manager that used to debate me about going to the cloud talked our CEO into purchasing a custom shopping cart software that ended up costing $10k monthly, and the company folded about five years later.
I'm proud to say they had on-prem servers still when the building was sold.
DontTakePeopleSrsly@reddit
I’m just waiting for someone to use ai to write a worm to hack all of the cloud data (if they haven’t done it already). I don’t care how good your security is, all the data in one pot is just too attractive to pass up.
TN_man@reddit
Isn’t having it on-premise the exact individual pot you’re referencing?
DontTakePeopleSrsly@reddit
But you’re talking a single company on prem vs almost every company on the NYSE plus government, plus millions more of more small companies in AWS.
Which one is someone going to invest millions in trying to crack?
randomlyme@reddit
It might be simpler to maintain it is unlikely to be cheaper.
jdiscount@reddit
Why can't you put everything in the cloud.
If the business wants to and there isn't a technical limitation, like something very legacy and unsupported.
I'm in consulting and there are plenty of very large companies that are near 100% in the cloud.
Does it make financial sense, not usually in my opinion but who cares I'm not the one paying the cloud bill.
I often find it's antiquated IT opinions/preferences as to why you can't be 100% in the cloud, not actual valid reasons beyond a few edge cases.
BasicallyFake@reddit
i dont think there are any that cant be, it just doesnt make sense sometimes.
agreed, if they want it there, move it, who cares.
thatpaulbloke@reddit
You can use cloud for everything. The issue is whether or not you should.
EduRJBR@reddit
I guess that the capability of the company to keep a decent on-premise structure, with low chances of interruptions in the availability of the services, is a main point, and if the majority of workers are there at the facilities or working remotelly.
Are we talking about multi-billion dollar companies that could create installations that could be considered datacenters, or small companies in a regular office building? Regardless of the money invested in advanced UPS systems: will a power failure also affect the local infrastructure of the ISPs and isolate the office from the Internet? In case the office gets isolated: who will be affected in what ways (like, accessing only e-mail but not an ERP system, or vice-versa), depending if the majority of people are onsite or offsite?
TN_man@reddit
No. Why can’t we
bfodder@reddit
We are literally doing what you are claiming about right now.
Sp00nD00d@reddit
Been explaining this for 14 months, with math and data to support it, C-Levels just stare blankly and repeat the question 3 weeks later and hire another outside firm to run the same numbers again.
We're on the 4th assessment, with the same results, and they're utterly confused how this can be the case.
Sroni4967@reddit (OP)
had a ceo ask why we cant just move our 40TB sql server to aws last week, showed him the monthly cost estimate and he went quiet real fast
Simple-Kaleidoscope4@reddit
Clouds great. Works well for specific use cases as does on-prem kit.
Everyone loves it in powerpoint until the bills start to arrive.
Asleep_Spray274@reddit
You scared you won't be able to unbox servers and run network cables into switches anymore ?
MarkInMinnesota@reddit
A few years ago we were using Azure as part of a critical business app .. the number of outages we experienced due to MS botching unannounced updates was beyond frustrating. Mainly because we were the ones that had to troubleshoot the problem and explain to the CIO.
Always made me wonder if operating in the cloud was truly worth it. But dang, their sales pitch was impressive.
RCTID1975@reddit
No, because I show them the numbers. Once they see how much a lot of the stuff costs for cloud, the convo ends pretty quickly.
If you're having repeated conversations, try a different explanation approach
Double_Confection340@reddit
No it is the opposite here they want to keep stuff on-prem because they hate paying for stuff monthly.
AffekeNommu@reddit
When you have a choice of running the legacy n-3 system on prem and having to constantly mitigate vulnerabilities or move to the same company's SAAS offering for less.
NotYourMommyEither@reddit
“cheaper” 🤣
BrainWaveCC@reddit
Simpler is highly debatable.
Except during outages. It's much simpler for IT to say, "there's an AWS outage" during outages. A whole lot less work.
Cheaper is quite laughable.
But hey, you can get your CapEx spending way down.
duncansmydog@reddit
Can’t forget about the people costs here. We’ve run our entire customer-facing infrastructure in Azure for over a decade with half the staff doing the same on-premise would have required. The cloud has been killing IT infrastructure jobs for a long time now. AI will nuke a much broader range of IT jobs.
I’ve been doing this since the late 90’s and the only constant is change. Be Prepared.
slashinhobo1@reddit
You can use cloud for everything if you have enough money. All cloud is, is someone elses infrastructure. Just need network equipment and unlimited money.
Loud_Posseidon@reddit
Easier to manage? Perhaps, you just need highly skilled people to design, deploy and operate it (IOW not cheap).
Cheaper? Not one bit: people and resources are going to be more expensive (speaking from experience). Plus you get your regular AWS outages - do they want them included in the price?
My guess is the board went to golf with some aws reseller and came back with this plan.
Dump your rough data into ai of your choice and explain how cloud for everything is not the best way.
phoenix823@reddit
You absolutely can use the cloud for everything. It'll cost more money every year and you lose the ability to capitalize large hardware purchases, but it does give you flexibility and in many cases, simplicity.
If you're willing to pay. As long as the business is open to paying for the privilege of flexibility and simplicity, I am 100% on board with that.
That's usually when they stop asking lol.
ohyeahwell@reddit
If you’re still on-prem in 2026 stay the course. You’re already in so much tech debt it won’t matter anyway. I’m surprised your ERP/LOB apps haven transitioned to SaaS. Impressive!
phunky_1@reddit
Those who pay the bills can decide on if everything can go in the cloud.
Is it cheaper? No.
Can you build it to be more resilient to failures and downtime? Yes
Some companies would rather pay more for the value it brings.
PromptMean6518@reddit
Same here - moving everything on the cloud.
Going from \~20k CAD / year in server costs (we build them ourselves because of tight budget in the past) to an estimate of \~1M CAD / year when the move will be done (mainly in Github Actions costs)
But we are still doing it because they want AI.
Yes, for them, AI = Github Copilot = Github Actions = Cloud, they don't even know what they are talking about.
Anyway, I don't care, that's not my money, and it does provide me a job, those endless migrations are not gonna be done by themselves.
Flabbergasted98@reddit
It would be more complex and more expensive.
But tell them you want to know the name of the sales guy who's been whispering in their ear.
peanutym@reddit
Been fighting this since about 2010.
Public_Fucking_Media@reddit
I mean ... yeah moving on prem to the cloud can be fucking great, simpler, and cheaper? Doesn't have to be AWS unless that's your bag.
mullsies@reddit
Yes it is more complex, more expensive and performance is crap for many (but not all) use cases.
MissionBusiness7560@reddit
Play along and see how they react when presented with an actual cost breakdown. They make it sound cheaper it doesn't mean that it is when you scale it.
Kardinal@reddit
Generally, for most organizations, cloud first, but not only.
Do on prem if you have to. Or if you're really tight on opex. But it usually enables functionality, flexibility, and value that on prem cannot.
Remember coat is about value.
EquivalentSilent776@reddit
Really depends on setup, for nonprofits full cloud can be very lucrative because of pricing or real estate where no one is in the office if they’re making money. Can be very cost effective if it’s done right.
CeC-P@reddit
Just keep reposting the "it's a trap" Star Wars meme over and over.
CPAtech@reddit
Do a cost analysis and show them. Mgmt understands $$$.
Known_Experience_794@reddit
Yes. And then some. This everyone needs to put everything in the cloud mentality has been driving me nuts for several years now. Not saying there aren’t some things where the cloud is a good solution for some entities. But everything all the time by everyone is just stupid IMHO. BUT C-suites are like lemmings. One goes and then others see it and start doing it too. Bleh
vistathes@reddit
I'm actually currently sitting for the AZ 104. It pushes so hard to sell the cost savings, but there's only good cost savings if there's good cost management. It should be expected that for new implementation of that scale, that it will take some time to tweak to really get the best value. There's many stories of people setting up their entire infrastructure in a cloud service and get billed with a fat invoice that they weren't expecting.
Sure, you can be cheaper, but do you have the ability get it right the first time as the real question.
ProgrammedVictory@reddit
I guess they haven't gotten the pricing yet.