Why Companies Are Ditching the Cloud: The Rise of Cloud Repatriation

How much of that is what technologists would consider "cloud" (IAAS, PAAS) versus what someone on the business side of things would consider "cloud" - office365, google gsuite, etc?

Given that AWS is doing $100B in annual revenue and still growing at 17% YoY ... and they do NOT have a collaboration suite (office/gsuite) - it'd say at least for AWS it's nearly all IaaS/PaaS.

https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/01/amazon_q1_2024/

I'd agree on IaaS/PaaS being the main driver. Id guess that everyone is running away from serverless offerings from all the main cloud providers. It's just day 1 lock in to a platform with no shared standards. It's very uncompetitive and kind of slow to innovate.

Afaik, MSFT shows growth in Azure and Office as separate things during earning reports, so the % mentioned before is just Azure, and 31% is huge.

Amazon loves it when you run idle EC2 instances ($$$) rather than using Lambda.

Most real workloads I've seen (at 3 startups, and several teams at Amazon) have utilization under 10%.

For Azure, all of it. Microsoft clumps Azure together with their server software (e.g. Windows Server, SQL Server) licensing when reporting the revenue, but give more fine-grained information on growth rates. This is the latter. (We also know the Azure business was already massive at $34 billion in 2022, since it got revealed during one of Microsoft's ongoing antitrust cases.)

For Google, I'm not aware of a reliable way of estimating the GCP vs. Workspace numbers. But they get asked it during earnings calls, and the answer has always been that the GCP growth is substantially faster than the Workspace growth.

Not to naysay, any idea of that includes their own website? Just curious. I don’t az itself is the largest aws customer anymore.

We’re migrating over a hundred apps to Azure App Service.

One has an issue with the platform-enforced HTTP timeout maximum values.

I migrated that app back to a VM in an hour.

It turns out that the “integration” for something like App Service (or CloudRun or whatever) is mostly just best practices for any kind of hosting: parameters read from environment variables, immutable binaries with external config, stateless servers, read only web app folders, monitoring with APMs, etc…

Sure, you’ll experience lockin if you use Durable Functions or the similar Lambda features… but no worse than any other workflow or business rules platform.

Ask people how easy it is to get off BizTalk or MuleSoft…

That's really where you see that no answer is right across the board.

I worked at a very small startup years ago that leaned heavily on EC2. Our usage was pretty bipolar, the service was along the lines of a real-time game so we either had a very heavy work load or nothing. We stood up EC2 instances when games were lice and wound them down after.

We did use Lambda for a few things, mainly APIs that were rarely used or for processing jobs in an event queue.

Serverless has its place for sure, but in my experience it have been heavily over used the last 3-5 years.

I’ve worked with a few organisations that I’d call “late adopters” to the cloud, and it’s rare for them to use IAAS or even PAAS. It’s all SAAS and serverless, and while they all say they’re doing devops it’s almost always clickops.

I’d suspect there is significant growth of businesses acting as intermediaries for cloud storage. I think that other software providers have also realized that ransoming users data is a great way to extract predictable, hedge-fund-owner-pleasing revenue without performing useful work.

AEC software providers all do this. ProjectWise is worse than owning or renting a plain file server in every way I can imagine, yet every consultant in transportation dutifully cuts Bentley a five-figure check or larger every year so they can hold your project files hostage and pretend to develop software.

I pray for a merciful asteroid to end it all.

It may not be as popular but they do have Amazon WorkDocs

> Amazon WorkDocs is a document storage, collaboration, and sharing system. Amazon WorkDocs is fully managed, secure, and enterprise scale.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/workdocs/latest/developerguide/w...

I weep for Amazon leadership, forcing themselves to use workdocs over quip is self sabotage imo

I think the solution to that problem is usually to have fewer and smaller EC2 instances.

And you only need to get utilization up to like 15% to make reserved instances significantly better than lambda.

This service has been discontinued recently, with a bunch of others that lacked adoption from customers.