I’m hearing it from “normal” people too which is actually quite weird. To the point of going back to paper for some stuff.
The answer was that they simply didn't trust GCP or AWS or Azure to see their data and know how much silly money they were making in the niche industry they almost completely monopolize.
I recently interviewed with a lower-case-m megacorp in a similar situation and they host on-prem for the same reason, at great expense and hassle in facilities all over the country.
Seems like theres room in the market for some kind of an On Prem Private Cloud Stack that emulates GCP/AWS etc but locally maybe?
Cloud-In-A-Box anyone?
It's more like cloud-in-a-rack, but that's what https://oxide.computer/ is trying to do isn't it?
On the DB side, I can't say too much as we're a pretty obviously identifiable AWS customer if I give out any details. I will only say that nothing fits our size and scale so we have to run on bare metal. That just makes it really fucking expensive colocation.
Don't even get me started on the API Gateway sitting in front of a group of related Lambdas. Its OK once you get it setup and running but buildign/changing it amounts to stabbing yourself in the eyes.
Open source, and works great when small, and at scale.
https://www.proxmox.com/en/products/proxmox-virtual-environm...
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=introduction+to...
Most on-prem deployments were trash and a lot of them still are. Not because it couldn't be better but because it's easier to just have some random hypervisor department do this work manually and not do the work to create it as an internal product. Even VMware with vrealize failed and that's about as 'customisable cloud platform in a box' as COTS enterprise software can get.
Maybe it's because IaC and APIs were just not in the vocabulary of the average system integrator or on-prem operating team (it's still lots of clickops and copy-paste).
The "cloud" rose to prominence from a small period of tiem where Amazon had a lot of extra cloud capacity outside of Black Friday, etc, and linux networking issues that needed architecture to be a certain way.
Those linux networking issues have been long since solved, but the "cloud" was discovered to be incredibly profitable and sticky in the name of convenience and proliferated.
A lot of the "cloud" software is open source software that was packaged to have a web and api front end, and that service renamed to something specific to AWS, etc.
