I was interested in a recent note Why we’re leaving the cloud from DHH (creator of RubyOnRails). They decided to leave AWS and GCP.
Because of what? Clouds are very expensive: resources are expensive, and the number of admins does not decrease from them. And some kind of peak /temporary resource consumption – in practice, this usually does not happen (it’s like earthquake insurance – if you live in an ordinary area, then there is no point in buying it – an example from the article).
I am of the same opinion. And the most interesting thing is that fewer and fewer CTOs are saying that public clouds are saving something there (as it was a few years ago).
Now there are still some arguments for using them, but with the intensification of the global crisis, more and more companies will switch to private clouds based on purchased servers and Kubernetes.
It is clear that some niche things will remain behind public clouds:
- hosting for small projects (but it’s more like something at the level of Google Firebase, i.e. PaaS, rather than a full-fledged cloud)
- temporary resources (more like a VPS, not a full-fledged cloud)
- backup storage (S3 API in different clouds is quite affordable and, according to ideology, backups should be stored in some independent place)
- some exotic scenarios (for example, a CDN is needed, but the project is still too small to negotiate with specialized networks)
There is even a possibility that public clouds will remain as a class, but then you need to expect a 2-4-fold drop in prices for basic computing resources and even more for all sorts of more advanced services.