In physics, a gallon of water weights 8.34 lbs. (For this analogy, a gallon of water is a unit of work.) And the gallon of water weighs 8.34 lbs irregardless if it is sitting on my desk in a physical building, or on your desk, in the cloud. Same weight, same unit of work. same effort. For a brand new, greenfield application, the cloud is a no brainer. I agree 100%. But for legacy applications, and there are so, soooo many, the cloud is just some one else's computer. Yes, the cloud is more scaleable, yes, the cloud is more manageable, and yes, you can control the cpu/storage/memory/network in much finer amounts. But legacy applications are very complicated. They have long tails, interconnections to other applications that cannot immediately be migrated to the cloud. I have migrated clients off of the cloud, back to on premise or to (co-lo) local hosting, because without rewriting the legacy application, the cloud costs are simply too great.
The essence of IT is to apply technology to solve a business problem. Otherwise, why would the business spend the money? The IT solution might be crazy/stupid/complex but if it works, many business simply adopt it and move on. Now, move that crazy/stupid/complex process to the cloud and surprise, it is very, very expensive. So, yes, the cloud is better, but only for some things. And until legacy applications are rewritten on-premise will exist.
One final insight. The cloud costs more. It has been engineered to be so, both from a profitability standpoint(Amazon is a for profit company) but also because the cloud has decomposed the infrastructure of IT into functional subcomponents, each of which cost money. When I was younger, the challenge for IT was explaining to management, the ROI of new servers, expanded networking, additional technology. We never quite got it right and often had it completely wrong. That was because we lacked the ability to account for/track and manage the actual costs of an on-premise operation. Accounting had one view, operations had another view and management had no idea really, why they were spending millions a year and could not get their business goals accomplished. The cloud changed all of that. You can do almost anything in the cloud, for a price. And I will humbly submit, that the cost of the cloud - minus the aforementioned profitability, is what on-premise organizations should have been spending all along. Anyone reading this and who has spent time in a legacy environment, knows that it is basically a futile exercise of keeping the plates spinning. On-premise failed because it could not get management to understand the value on in-house IT.
As I said, the costs are the same. A gallon of water weighs what it weighs regardless of location. It will be interesting to see, I predict the pendulum will swing back.
The essence of IT is to apply technology to solve a business problem. Otherwise, why would the business spend the money? The IT solution might be crazy/stupid/complex but if it works, many business simply adopt it and move on. Now, move that crazy/stupid/complex process to the cloud and surprise, it is very, very expensive. So, yes, the cloud is better, but only for some things. And until legacy applications are rewritten on-premise will exist.
One final insight. The cloud costs more. It has been engineered to be so, both from a profitability standpoint(Amazon is a for profit company) but also because the cloud has decomposed the infrastructure of IT into functional subcomponents, each of which cost money. When I was younger, the challenge for IT was explaining to management, the ROI of new servers, expanded networking, additional technology. We never quite got it right and often had it completely wrong. That was because we lacked the ability to account for/track and manage the actual costs of an on-premise operation. Accounting had one view, operations had another view and management had no idea really, why they were spending millions a year and could not get their business goals accomplished. The cloud changed all of that. You can do almost anything in the cloud, for a price. And I will humbly submit, that the cost of the cloud - minus the aforementioned profitability, is what on-premise organizations should have been spending all along. Anyone reading this and who has spent time in a legacy environment, knows that it is basically a futile exercise of keeping the plates spinning. On-premise failed because it could not get management to understand the value on in-house IT.
As I said, the costs are the same. A gallon of water weighs what it weighs regardless of location. It will be interesting to see, I predict the pendulum will swing back.