To me, Cloud is all about the shift left of DevOps. It’s not a cost play. I’m a Dev Lead / Manager and have worked in both types of environments over the last 10 years. It’s immeasurable the velocity difference as far as system provisioning between the two approaches. In the hardware space, it took months to years to provision new machines or upgrade OSes. In the cloud, it’s a new terraform script and a CI deploy away. Need more storage? It’s just there, available all the time. Need to add a new firewall between machines or redo the network topology? Free. Need a warm standby in 4 different regions that costs almost nothing but can scale to full production capacity within a couple of minutes? Done. Those types of things are difficult to do with physical hardware. And if you have an engineering culture where the operational work and the development work are at odds (think the old style of Dev / QA / Networking / Servers / Security all being separate teams), processes and handoffs eat your lunch and it becomes crippling to your ability to innovate. Cloud and DevOps are to me about reducing the differentiation between these roles so that a single engineer can do any part of the stack, which cuts out the communication overhead and the handoff time and the processes significantly.
If you have predictable workloads, a competent engineering culture that fights against process culture, and are willing to spend the money to have good hardware and the people to man it 24x7x365 then I don’t think cloud makes sense at all. Seems like that’s what y’all have and you should keep up with it.
If you have predictable workloads, a competent engineering culture that fights against process culture, and are willing to spend the money to have good hardware and the people to man it 24x7x365 then I don’t think cloud makes sense at all. Seems like that’s what y’all have and you should keep up with it.