Some people act like it's some kind of black magic. It's not. We've some customers in our DC and some on AWS for various reasons. AWS isn't less problematic. AWS is about 10x more expensive. Both on prem and cloud require people familiar with them and cloud-engineers are in no way cheaper.
Only meaningful problem is that on-prem requires some up front cost&time. That can be mitigated by leasing and other means, but indeed can be an issue for small businesses.
I think the real story is a bit sordid: office politics. On-prem and cloud are different skillsets. Companies that have been around for a while can end up with both on-prem and cloud experts who end up competing with each other, often on separate teams. Throw in some slick consultants from Amazon who are able to bend the ear of the VP and you've got a real problem. From what I've seen it doesn't end well for the on-prem team!
Next thing you know these multi-million-dollar contracts are signed and the existing teams are just shaking their heads. The smart ones have already put out their resumes and started interviewing elsewhere.
- small business with at least some reliability expectation, and little to none IT expertise
- huge workload requirement volatility
- having someone else to blame
- solution is already working in cloud, with teams being very comfortable there, and perceiving on-prem as “enemy” (analogy: forcing devs to rewrite stuff from haskell to java)
- that extra cost is small budget line for you
On the other hand, it does not make sense to go cloud, if you are sufficiently big and already have on prem solution and expertise in house. (Extreme case: google, does not use aws for its main load; this upper threshold I wager is couple of orders of magnitude smaller)
Not a good example in my opinion, as Google is also a major provider of cloud services. AWS isn't the only game in town.
I think Disney+ is a more interesting case. A quick google search turns up some articles saying their video streaming is powered by external CDNs. As I understand it, Netflix take the opposite approach and deliver all video data from their own Open Connect CDN, although they use AWS for other workloads (presumably including things like authentication, their recommendation engine, etc).
It’s in no way the norm for a smaller business.
It may not be true for you and where you work but this is a very real thing in a lot of organizations, where development teams want a quicker turn around on booting up services they need as the product evolves and having some control over how they act with each other. It (sometimes to negative results) opens up more architectural possibilities to solve problems
What I'm saying is some people are trying to portrait rolling your own k8s or on-prem as equivalent to rolling your own crypto - better left to the chosen ones with years of training in secret monastery. This is BS :-)
I also think if a company is unhappy with their current set up and thinks that switching from cloud to on-prem (or vis versa) is the answer, they're probably delusional because "the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves."
Requires some planning ahead of time - yes. Harder - not really.
