Cloud is the only option

or why if you work for a company that is not using the public cloud you should quit

If I told you that the bakery downstairs owns its own power plant you would think that they lost their mind.

So why don’t we call crazy those companies that manage their own datacenters instead of relying on the public cloud?

My advice is simple: if you work for a company that doesn’t use any major cloud provider, or at least is not making steady concrete progress toward it, you should quit and go work for a modern company.

Otherwise you are wasting your time and your skills are decaying into oblivion.

That’s it, just quit.

Ok ok, maybe you really like this company and want to really help management understand the mistake. Or maybe you are management and want to understand what you are doing wrong.

So here my version of stuff that people that don’t understand cloud say:

It’s too expensive

Cloud makes hidden costs visible, managing your own datacenter is incredibly expensive but let’s assume for a moment that you can find a technical architecture that makes it cheaper on prem.

Why would you spend your focus and energy in maintaning something that isn’t valuable for your customers? Hiring more people isn’t free, managing contracts with vendors isn’t free.

Doing the job of AWS better than AWS is a pipe dream, and that extra money you pay gives you freedom to do something else. And time is the only thing you can’t buy.

What about vendor lock-in?

Very common argument against cloud native or serverless is the scary monster of “vendor lock-in”. This scary halloween story takes place in a world in which AWS or GCP suddenly start raising prices and your company will be forced to pay an hefty (unfair) bill for the same service.

Some people at this point will suggest “multicloud” or “hybrid cloud”, as a risk mitigation that is even more dangerous than your own data centers.

Let’s face it, the lock-in argument is just FUD. Betting entirely on a platform is the only way to reap its benefit and we live daily through vendor lock-ins (have you tried to switch from iPhone to Android?).

Building your own “vendor agnostic” platform is just another form of lock-in, just more expensive.

Legacy!

For sure moving to the cloud isn’t free, workloads needs to be rearchitected to avoid spending a fortune, but if a company is unable to touch its own legacy (legacy == money machine) then it has bigger problems than cloud native.

Moreover all major providers offer hybrid solutions to move legacy workloads at this point, I am familiar with Anthos but I know all of them of a version of it, so is just a matter of willingness to do it.

I don’t want Google/Amazon to access my data

This is a fair concern but also not a real problem, even if in theory they cannot access your data, you can easily encrypt data to make sure that even if they do they can’t read it.

But really, you should be much more worried of Amazon Basics and Google AdWords.

“Digital Transformation”

If anyone says this. Run, fast.