Are Tech Companies Ditching Cloud?
Are Tech Companies Ditching Cloud?
Companies that made the big move
I have not been a big fan of cloud and cloud architecture ever since I very enthusiastically used it for the first time. Yes, the promises were high, and many of us literally believed that serverless means magic, at least till we got a chance to try it hands-on.
Of course, there were benefits to start with, especially the time it would take to build, deploy and bring an app live was phenomenal.
The time-saving capability bundled with the lowest price one could possibly imagine was the biggest attraction of AWS when it launched. I remember the time it used to cost 1$ a year.
Things changed, and unlike small applications, moving enterprise applications to the cloud required much more work than what the Ops teams were once used to.
With the boom in cloud tech, the cloud family expanded with many new products in the market. With each new solution came a brand new challenge, and the family just continued to grow until someone realized that the bills were stupidly huge.
But what about the cost savings all the cloud companies offer? Was that just a marketing gimmick? I don’t know enough to comment on that, but what I know for sure is that IT consultancies made a lot of many with one selling point — “we will bring your cloud costs down.”
Long story short, many companies, after realizing the real cost and challenges involved with cloud tech, have started moving away from the cloud or have cut down the yearly cloud budget significantly.
Companies Not So Happy With Cloud
HEY and Basecamp
HEY and Basecamp are two companies that have realized the power of managing their own infrastructure.
In their own blog, the CTO of HEY and Basecamp goes into much in detail on why they are exiting the cloud. The main factors driving this change are cost-cutting and reduced complexity.
Snapchat
Snapchat was recently in the news for course correcting their cloud spending by cutting down on Google and AWS expenses.
Even though the exact numbers are not out, here is an interesting read on Snapchat’s decision.
Dropbox
This one was possibly the early bird who paved the way for many other tech companies to shift their workload from the cloud to data centers. Dropbox claimed to have saved $75 million with this move.
The cloud might be the right choice for small-scale businesses that don’t have to manage their own infrastructure and also for those that expect unpredictable traffic but for established businesses with steady traffic it would be worth evaluating the current cloud spending and considering an alternative.