Linked – Wait, is cloud bad?

There is no lie here –

“We’re paying for what we’ve forgotten how to do. There’s a certain elegiac tone to this discourse, isn’t there? A sense that things were better in the good old days before the “cloud craze”, when every company had a data center and knew how to use it.

Anytime you hear an appeal to nostalgia, your instinct should be to distrust it. I was around for some of the good old days and I can assure you they were terrible. At least, they were terrible from where I was sitting, which was far from Silicon Valley and surrounded by accidental IT people (including me) who were just making stuff up as we went along. I well remember the all-hands-on-deck calamity every time we did a midnight maintenance window, the water leaks, the endless procurement cycles and weeks-long “release trains,” the manual processes, the pet servers.”

I remember it too. I saw it happening all around me daily. The many, many conversations around patches, updates, maintenance windows, end-of-life products, etc. were overwhelming.

Is it cheaper this way? Probably, but at what cost? What things could your technical staff be doing instead?

And, at the end of the day, how much do you have to depend on those folks not leaving and taking all that institutional knowledge with them? That happens when you run your own data center.

Maybe the big thing is that most companies are not tech companies. They use tech, and they have an IT department, but it’s not their core function. If it’s not your core function do you want to be in the data center business? Because if you decide to free yourself from the cloud, someone on your staff is in that business.

https://newsletter.goodtechthings.com/p/wait-is-cloud-bad

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