You’ve described the historical value of cloud computing perfectly. That said, I think the days where all but the largest or most stubborn companies run their own datacenters are coming to a close.
The problem will be finding skilled labor. Short-haul networking, power configurations, thermal load, hardware maintenance; these and many more are specific skills that can’t be learned overnight. Data center work used to be a viable middle-class career, but the pay scale for it has gone down and down. Companies that do run their own DCs like Google and Facebook have a few centralized experts, a thin professional staff on-prem, and an army of minimum wage disk swappers who are told what to do by a ticket system, just like an Amazon warehouse worker. The knowledge of how to build and run these things is all at the top now.
I’m not saying the jobs or talent pool are gone. Just that they’re shrinking, and will continue to shrink. Like the manufacturing industry, the fewer people there are who are comfortable working with real hardware, the harder it will be to start anew.
The problem will be finding skilled labor. Short-haul networking, power configurations, thermal load, hardware maintenance; these and many more are specific skills that can’t be learned overnight. Data center work used to be a viable middle-class career, but the pay scale for it has gone down and down. Companies that do run their own DCs like Google and Facebook have a few centralized experts, a thin professional staff on-prem, and an army of minimum wage disk swappers who are told what to do by a ticket system, just like an Amazon warehouse worker. The knowledge of how to build and run these things is all at the top now.
I’m not saying the jobs or talent pool are gone. Just that they’re shrinking, and will continue to shrink. Like the manufacturing industry, the fewer people there are who are comfortable working with real hardware, the harder it will be to start anew.