It feels like every few months there’s a new tech “revolution” being hyped up as the future. Besides AI, what’s the most overhyped trend in tech right now? For me, it’s the constant buzz around the metaverse.
Cloud. Businesses went all in on cloud under this illusion of stable costs, but costs go up and contol/support have gone down, and I’m seeing businesses spin on-prem back up.
Id go so far as to say SaaS in general. Small startups are paying $5000/month to send emails and we’ve come to the point where inboxes are monopolized and if you don’t pay up to a cloud provider your emails end up in spam.
Take this and repeat for everything. Monopolize, ratchet up the costs, profit.
1000% this. Without giving away too much information, I work(ed) for a cloud provider (not one of the big ones, there are a surprising number of smaller ones in the field you’ve probably never heard of before). I quit this week to take a position in local government with some quaint, on-prem setup.
- We were always understaffed for what we promised. Two guys per shift and if one of us took vacation; oops, lol. No extra coverage, just deal.
- Everyone was super smart but we didn’t have time to work the tickets. Between crashes, outages, maintenance, and horrendous tickets that took way too much work to dig into, there was just never enough time. If you had a serious problem that took lengthy troubleshooting, good luck!
- We over-promised on support we could provide, often taking tickets that were outside of infrastructure scope (guest OS shit, you broke your own server, what do you want me to do about it?) and working them anyway to please the customer or forwarding them directly to one of our vendors and chaining their support until they caught wise and often pushed back.
- AI is going to ruin Support. To be clear, there will always be support and escalation engineers who have to work real problems outside the scope of AI. However without naming names, there’s a big push (it’ll be everyone before too long, mark it) for FREE tier support to only chat with AI bots. If you need to talk to a real human being, you gotta start dishing out that enterprise cash.
Mix all that together and then put the remaining pressure on the human aspect still holding things up and there’s a collapse coming. Once businesses get so big they’re no longer “obligated” to provide support, they’ll start charging you for it. This has always been a thing of course, anyone who’s worked enterprise agreements knows that. But in classic corpo values, they’re closing the gap. Pay more for support, get less in return. They’ll keep turning that dial until something breaks catastrophically, that’s capitalism baby.
And that’s why you go with the big guys (and pay a premium for it).
I work for a SaaS company that offers a cloud version as well as a software license. We only support the big 3 because everyone else is just keeping their systems up with chewing gum and duct tape, and it’s infuriatingly inconsistent. No way of offering a reasonable SLA or for our support guys to dig into an infra problem. And this includes relatively big players like Ali, Tencent, Yandex, DO or OVH.
In the end, 95% of customers pay less if they choose the cloud version, only if you have 24/7 steady load (and a high one) will it be cheaper to pay for infra, SREs, licenses and support.
Basically you save money on tech/support because of scale.
So you triple and quadruple your sales and marketing spend to get more business.
In the end it just doesn’t work, except the smaller guys and a lot of them are just hanging on as the stacks get more complicated.
Aws and gcloud are thickening the stack and driving everyone else out of business.
I totally agree…the best solution for the specific problem. “Cloud” was the buzzword solution to every problem for a few years and it wasn’t great in a lot of cases. High I/O home grown apps to be used from a single campus don’t need to be in the cloud. Bulk archive storage doesn’t need to be in the cloud, things like lecture recordings from 10+ years.
Disagree. People are terrible using the cloud, and often are doing lift and shift instead of modernizing.
Incompetent users are the problem, not the cloud.
Completely disagree. This last March, Microsoft changed the storage limit per user on OneDrive for education from 1TB to 100GB, and users either had to delete a ton of files or pay for increased license/space. We ended up standing an on-prem file server back up shortly thereafter because we could not get our users and faculty to delete research data and could not afford to nearly double our cost expenditure. In my experience doing IT budget for years, cloud has meant that you cannot predict your yearly expenditures, Especially if you use your services that are funded in part by venture capital. Let’s say you start using some cool research presentation project and suddenly the economy dips and they lose funding, the cost goes way up. Life cycle management has gone completely out the toilets in my experience with cloud products.
Well, if you did your budget planning with a loss leader that can happen. Did you get prices from AWS S3, Google Suite, Azure Blob storage, GCP, etc, or just blindly went back to what you knew?
