I’m no fan of cloud.

Well, that implies I don’t like The Cloud. That’s not true. I don’t like the hype surrounding The Cloud; and in particular the obsession with AWS. What I do like is using the right tool for the job, and in some cases that is indeed The Cloud.

The thing is, it just isn’t. The right tool that is. And I would argue so in nearly all cases.

Once upon a time, it made sense. Why spend money (capex) on hardware based on your peak demand when it would sit idle 95% of the time? If you rented shared hardware (for a small premium) you could scale up just when you needed to, and end up better off.

Except that it’s 15 years later and you now need to commit and prepay 3 years up front to achieve reasonable pricing. That sounds an awful lot like capex to me. And that small premium for flexibility hasn’t gone away.

Now rinse and repeat that mindset for every layer of the stack from network to application, every service, database row, ingress and egress byte, etc. and you really have to wonder how this came to be?!

Furthermore, it’s so complex and with so many deliberately crafted tricks to lock-in and price gouge that there are a complex web of professions dedicated to make sense of it all. Now wasn’t one of the other arguments in favour of The Cloud that you didn’t need all these technical skills and staff? Hmm.

Now… cloud-like technology? Sure! Virtualisation, Containerisation, Orchestration, Automation, etc. all make a ton of sense both in terms of architectural flexibility and operational fluidity.

And here’s the thing. You can do all that pretty easily yourself on any hardware – owned or leased – as you like. In turns out you don’t need to pay a handsome fee to someone like Amazon to do pretty simple stuff.

But why take my word for it? David Hansson probably said it better…

https://world.hey.com/dhh/why-we-re-leaving-the-cloud-654b47e0