I really think this shouldn't be an either-or thing, most especially for established companies, but to some extent for growing ones as well.
If you run a data center in the same city/cities as your engineering strengths are located, that doesn't necessarily give you the geographical diversity you need for many companies. But if you don't run any data centers, you're blind to some of the cost structures, and architectural limitations of the system, and you can become soft.
I was going to make a simile to Google and Facebook having their own hardware divisions, but I don't really need to, because they are planning to make cloud-friendly custom hardware for data centers. This seems like an area that the incumbents should be all over but I can't recall the last time I read of innovations from them. Which means there is space for someone new to establish a toe-hold.
If I were based in Chicago I'd want a data center in Chicago, and Cloud Servers on the West Coast, (and Europe, etc as applicable). But the lock-in situation is untenable to me right now. It's pretty easy to end up deploying multiple solutions for the same situation. That just complicates reasoning about the system. It bears a resemblance to the Lavaflow antipattern and I can tell you that either can be no fun at all.
I'm not sure why I chose the phrase 'planning to' about custom hardware, when we know that they've been doing this for a very long time, and FB in particular has not only published designs but multiple cycles of amendments to those designs.
If you run a data center in the same city/cities as your engineering strengths are located, that doesn't necessarily give you the geographical diversity you need for many companies. But if you don't run any data centers, you're blind to some of the cost structures, and architectural limitations of the system, and you can become soft.
I was going to make a simile to Google and Facebook having their own hardware divisions, but I don't really need to, because they are planning to make cloud-friendly custom hardware for data centers. This seems like an area that the incumbents should be all over but I can't recall the last time I read of innovations from them. Which means there is space for someone new to establish a toe-hold.
If I were based in Chicago I'd want a data center in Chicago, and Cloud Servers on the West Coast, (and Europe, etc as applicable). But the lock-in situation is untenable to me right now. It's pretty easy to end up deploying multiple solutions for the same situation. That just complicates reasoning about the system. It bears a resemblance to the Lavaflow antipattern and I can tell you that either can be no fun at all.