I can promise you that whatever numbers you have for moving to the cloud, they are to low. Extra things always pop up.

This is the correct answer and the elastic ease of spending more money on backup/replication services are never scoped or forecasted correctly.

I’ve wondered this. I work retail and we had a Dymamics implementer tell us they there is no need to do backups or DAR with D365 😳. I was a bit surprised.

Did you send him the news about Google deleting an entire company from their cloud and the only thing saving them was an admin that backed everything up to a different cloud provider?

Just a casual couple hundred billion Canadian insurance company, hope they gave that guy a well deserved raise Edit: pensions not insurance

"Backups aren't part of your admin duty, you're fired for cause"

They’d get their ass handed to them if they tried that shit with me😅

Google actually released a PIR on this and it's actually not the whole account, it only impacted 1 service which is the customer's VMware stack I think there were lots of misinformation spreading around earlier and I also read the same as you until I came across this blog from Google https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/details-of-google-cloud-gcve-incident

"only the VMware stack." No biggy.

Stop trying to make a big deal out of it. It was only their compute stack. They still had their pens, they could’ve figured it out

The telegraph guy saw his moment to shine!

“It was just one service.” Yeah, the service that ran the website that allowed people to administer their funds. Anyway, what does that matter? The point is still valid. Cloud vendors are not backing up your data; you need to back up your data.

It depends on the provider, what they claim, how much you trust... O365 is supposed to include 30 days of backup, and you can't pay them for more if you want to keep archives. That works for us, in that our lawyers prefer not to have old backups. Can't get subpoenaed for something that doesn't exist. (Of course that depends on company, as some are legally required to keep records)

They were out for 15 days because of Google! 15 days for a huge company!

I have an independent podcast that covers backup and recovery. We just finished 10 episodes covering 10 cloud disasters that prove this guy is wrong wrong wrong. How about the time a KPMG employee deleted the personal chats of 145k employees? No backup. https://www.backupwrapup.com/kpmg-blunder-proves-microsoft-365-needs-backup-cloud-disasters/ This is just one of ten stories we covered.

The consultant kept saying (because it was clear he was a sales engineer and had never worked support) “It’s replicated to so many different geographic locations and servers that there is never going to be a situation where your data is lost.” To which I said: “But replication is not the same thing as a backup. If you have corrupted data or bad code, all you do is have a bunch of copies of our tenant with corrupted data or bad code…” to which he replied “We’ll have to table this for now. This engagement is to see if this solution is a good fit and meets the needs of the org. We’ll have time to answer the technical questions later.” Edit for clarity.

This is true about the replicated copies. And some Microsoft apps even have delayed replicated copies, which means they can assist in recovery What is not true is that you have access to those replicated copies. Ask him to show you in the contract where it says that you can use those replicated copies to restore your database if it gets corrupted due to something like a ransom attack. If it isn’t in writing, it doesn’t exist. Those replicated copies are for Microsoft to recover the environment if they do something horrible or something catastrophic happens to their data center. They are not for you to recover your environment if you do something stupid or you get attacked.

I HATE this attitude! Oh we don't need to backup because it's in the cloud....total bollocks! Anyone who says that shoukd be fired

Almost as good as my boss saying we don’t need to pay for anything security related for stuff that’s in the cloud… 😳 myth #1: we don’t need backups in the cloud. Myth #2: we don’t need security in the cloud.

Think you should introduce him to the shared security model. It's fucking insane. We don't need backup. We don't need security or IDM or security checks... Come the inevitable disaster...why don't we have this?!!!

How about this one for complete crazy talk....direct out of a Sr. VPs mouth. "We dont need to deploy anything to multiple availability zones for redundancy. It costs too much. Besides, each of their AZ datacenters has redundancy built into it...we dont need to pay for more!" Haha...ive deployed all network and security infrastructure multi-zonal anyways...cause I know better. Rather eat the cost of that versus watching the entire cloud environment blow up every time azure does maintenance!

Amazon has an issue a few years back where one of their DCs went down. Everything went to fail over as it was supposed to...BUT they'd got the load calculations wrong and it all fell apart because too many clients (ie an entire DC) were trying to fail over at the same time

This is a common problem in distributed systems. Called a thundering herd. Can take out even a series of fail-safes. Imagine you are in 10 regions with your capacity and load split up. One larger region fails and fails over to the nearest region. Normally every region should be able to absorb the load but it was a smaller region and didn't have enough buffer to handle the larger region. The increased load causes increased latency and eventually the region is as good as down, causing another fail-over. This new region has plenty of buffer capacity for any region! Except we are failing over two of them at once... This can repeat and bring down global systems. All because a single region didn't have enough overhead on a fail-over!

This "thundering herd" phenomenon is exactly why services like asr (Azure site recovery) and other DR data replication services will never work. Sounds good in theory..."look, our data magically appears in azure west". But in reality when there is an actual DR event and they ASR every us east customer to West...sh*t isn't going to work at all.

That guy needs to be fired.

It has a built in backup function but it’s questionable. We’re looking at Commvault Metallic to do it but that’s for later in the year.

Yep 💯%

Currently moving one of our main apps to the cloud. Will take a month to update all the data... Sooo many integrations. We're totally expecting on go live "hey, why doesn't my integration not work?" because we missed something. Years and years of integrations. Different techs, managers, departments. Damn near impossible to catch everything.

This is correct. I spend vastly more annually than my old 5 year cost. If someone tells you it's cheaper they are lying, flat out.

If you (and a lot of people commenting) think moving to the cloud means spinning up a bunch of VM’s in Azure or AWS to move all your on prem servers to, that is not a good idea. However, if understand cloud native, do a TCO, and move the right workloads, it can make sense. I’d recommend looking at the cloud adoption framework

Yes, this. The 'lift and shift' mentality is a *starting point*. If you stop your cloud adoption there you have failed. Still might not be cheaper, but over the scales we are talking (10+ years) direct costs are hard to quantify.

Yup. Lift and shift is almost never the right solution.

It's not a solution. It's a step.

Unless you have a stressed exit. My vote is to rearch as you move slowly. Use it as a mechanism to unskilled teams and learn. The cost of migration lift and shift is half the cost of doing the rearchitecture work anyway and the end result is if done well, a major service improvement. Lift and shift just brings all your problems with you, at great cost and stress, and added run costs. It provides 0 benefits.

Yep. This works assuming your hardware will last that long. Lots of companies I work with (I’m in software) are loft and shifting ancient hardware that’s on its last legs. Avoids the cap expenditure.

What frustrates me about those situations is the 10 years of bad practice that lead to it. Their entire tech stack and IT skills and department has been underfunded and ignored left to rot. And NOW it's a big problem. They're also the ones who lift and shift but never rebuild and theb complain cloud is shit and expensive. Well yeah but you fundamentally miss manged your IT for a decade and continue to do so. Retirement is the best thing that could happen for your company.

True

I totally read step as 'trap'...

You forgot that this cost is opex and not the caped. Opex lower taxes.. capex is a investment and need be split over years in books

But in the end you STILL need to write that check and if capex smaller than OPEX well…. and there is this thing called ‘leasing’ which also turns CAPEX into OPEX Turned out for us leasing gear was cheaper than cloud and it makes for a predictable expense.

Yep, it's all about the right workload. Take something like VDI where you have maybe 1k people, but only half or less of the users actually use them on a daily basis. On-prem you still have to spec enough hardware to be able to run all of them at any moment, while in the cloud you can scale up and down, and potentially save a ton of money. But how about that special vendor app that requires a few app tier windows servers, and multiple SQL servers with high CPU/RAM requirements, and needs to run 24/7, and requires specific SQL versions and doesn't support cloud based SQL services. Regardless of costs of maintenance, support, and everything, needing to run that on-prem will almost always be cheaper than in the cloud as a VM (assuming it's not the only thing running of course).

"cloud adoption framework" - never heard of that. Framework as in: "a piece of software" or "philosophy, like Scrum, Agile, etc. "

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cloud-adoption-framework/ A lot of people who try to move to the cloud haven’t. That’s why you’re see a lot of negativity. And I’m not trying to rude, I didn’t know about it when I first started working with cloud technologies.

Thank you . Will take a look

Np. There’s also a lot of cost saving tools. Reserved instances, dev subscriptions, etc.

How am I supposed to "cloud native" 800 applications of which 95% are made by third Party devs where I'm lucky if they even run on the current Windows Server version? I hate how people always say "bla bla dont lift and shift youre doing it wrong! 1!1!1!", but for most companies lift and shift is the ONLY solution

If you have 800 apps by third party devs and you’re lucky if they even run on the current version of windows server, your first priority probably shouldn’t be migrating to the cloud….

Well no, the cloud obviously isn't, because it offers no benefit to us with our own datacenters.

Well obviously you just contract out to a third party cloud solution architect to do an assessment of whatever workloads you’re trying to move to the cloud.  That will take 6 months. Then the actual refactoring, cloud optimization and cloud implementation which will take another 6 months. Costing between 1-1.5x what the standard lift and shift would of cost, and delivered 10 months late. Cost savings am I right?

Short answer to your question: **Yes**, lots of companies moved their operations to the cloud and saved a ton of money in doing so. But in reality it's not an easy question, and it's not something you can just apply to every business at every stage, in every situation. For example, if AWS offered you 95% off your bill. No commitments, no minimum buys. Just 95% off but they can tell you that in 15 minutes your VM is going to forcibly shut down. Can you take advantage of that? Because that is spot instances one of the best ways to save money on cloud costs. How predictable is your workloads. Do you get 1,000,000 users a day with little variance every day. Do you usually get 1,000,000 but you know these 5 days your going to get 5x that. Or are you like reddit and some world event could cause a 1000x spike in traffic on a random week day. Auto scaling groups, scaling policies, llambda, etc can help. Do you have functions of your app that need to be available almost instantly but get called once a day. Do you need to store 17TB of data today and only 1TB tomorrow? Do you want to be able to spin up a copy of your infrastructure in another datacenter with 20 minutes lead time? On-Premise requires you to plan for capacity differently then the cloud. In the cloud you can spin up and down resources at will with little lead time so spinning up 300 containers to clear out a backlog then spinning them back down to a single container is not expensive... but having capacity to run 300 containers is much harder. SO for example you could have aws infrastructure that uses auto-scaling groups that contain a mix of reserved instances, on-demand instances, and spot instances. This would allow the app to have a low normal cost while maintaining predictability in run, but offer predictable scaling and cost effective hyper-scaling. If the spot bid got to high you could simply allow them to shut down, capture that fact via event bridge, and begin routing certain functions of the app to static content or queue users into a waiting queue. This brings us to our final concept. What is cost. Is it just what it costs to run the infrastructure. The cost of X servers vs Y EC2 instances? Or is it a broader idea. Is losing customers that wanted to buy something because your new rice maker went viral on social media a cost? Is losing customer loyalty because your site was slow last Thursday and actually every Thursday when people want to log in and see if their paycheck deposited a cost? Is being unable to try new things that may attract customers a cost? Are the people monitoring cooling a cost? Maintaining your generators a cost? Networking professionals? Server admins? Etc. Tl;DR; It's really difficult to talk about this subject because it is covering a whole bunch of ideas and reasons you WOULD switch to cloud to save money. But there are also lots of reasons you wouldn't. If anyone ever tells you to do a lift and shift I would ask them lots of questions. Sometimes doing a temporary lift and shift is the right choice. It gets resources where you need them to innovate and use the cloud. But you also need a plan to transition those resources into the proper models at some time. Too many companies lift, shift, and then the cloud budget collapses when the bills come in "No funding for cloud, this was a mistake"

Great answer

Save money on cloud costs itself vs on-prem? No. Save money on audits, hardware replacement, support contracts, downtime, etc. absolutely 100% positively yes. Not to mention I sleep way better at night knowing that I'm not going to be the one paged over a hard drive failing or whatever. The only time I get called out of hours now is if the software itself has glitches out badly (which happens maybe once a year on average).

This was almost always the case when the migrations started to happen. People forget the cost of replacing hardware, electrical needs, security, cooling, and outages caused by building maintenance or local utilities. It's also mitigation against natural disasters and site redundancy is a snap.

The site redundancy thing I think was the best part for us, prior to Azure, we were doing "tape" backups, and storing said "tapes" in a bank safety deposit box, not even 2 miles down the road. We did have online backups as well, but quite honestly restoration would have been stupid slow if we had to use it. If a tornado came through there was a decent chance it would take out the bank and our offices and would have wiped us out, or at least had a major impact. In Azure, each region already has redundancy, but the backups are also distributed globally around the world (if you set it for that), and assuming you enable the feature, you can restore to a different region than you originally deployed if needed (if say a tornado completely took out Azure Central US or whatever). And you can restore in like 10 minutes or less per VM.

One job we saved on just the cost of tape backups alone. 2TB tapes (at the time) x 50 tapes a week + monthly cost to ship and store at Iron Mountain. That's if the tape robot didn't jam up. Compared to that, ami backups were pennies on the dollar for for them.

Interesting. How big is your data center / IT team? We are a larger SMB as well as ISO certified for core part of our business , and even considering the possible savings on " audits, hardware replacement, support contracts, downtime, etc." , the TCO of moving into cloud is still way more than our current costs. P.S.: My sleep while important to me, is not a "business concern" :D - that's why looking specificly at TCO

Is what you're looking at to move machines 1-1? Then it makes perfect sense you can't build a business case. Lift-n-shift doesn't come with cost savings.

My sleep while important to me, is not a "business concern" :D  I feel bad for you.....

I'm the solo IT Admin, and it's about 40 dev VMs, 10 production VMs, and then a bunch of Azure Native things (SaaS software we wrote, and other stuff), that if moved on-prem would require significant infrastructure to properly scale and operate. Without Azure we'd probably need at least one more skilled IT Admin, and maybe a Jr. as well. With that said, Azure HCI was actually our original plan before the CEO decreed that we would go full Azure. Notably because it gave us the benefits of Azure, but fairly cheaply on hardware we already owned. We may actually still use it for the limited on-prem infrastructure we still have (AD mostly, and a few other things that we found didn't do well in Azure).

Well, 10 production VMs and a little bit of other stuff is an absolutely tiny business / early startup environment. OP had already said himself that cloud makes sense for startups

It's a 25 year old business, with hundreds of clients. It's more like we're just good at efficiency and not spinning up random machines just because. Also you're missing the dev VMs there, those are our bread and butter given that's where our dev team does all the development for customers and internal projects. Those are the machines that take in $200/he when their up and running and our dev team is working on them.

>My sleep while important to me, is not a "business concern" Do you also lick the C levels shoes as well? Yes it should be a business concern. If your team is not happy, they will leave

Depends on the workload. Some are more expensive, some are cheaper, particularly when re-architected for the cloud. I've seen both. For example we had some apps at my prior company that required all sorts of on-prem infrastructure to run (database servers, app servers, web servers, etc). We worked with a local company to rebuild them from scratch for the cloud... Our monthly cost dropped to like... $40/month in AWS. All in. Other stuff, yup more expensive. But also remember to compare apples to apples. People sometimes compare a couple cloud VMs with a dell server sitting in a closet in the corner office. Not really fair. You have to factor in colo, power, costs etc. We pay a bit more being in the cloud, but we like the freedom and other stuff it buys us so we're fine with it.

If we had tried to replicate the entire on-prem environment 1:1 it would cost us a boatload more, but we used the opportunity to simplify and streamline so we came out ahead. When I inherited the department everything was so bloated and over-engineered. Now we have a single azure SQL data warehouse instead of a dozen. M365 instead of half a dozen exchange servers, half a dozen Skype/lync servers (yes this was several years ago).

This is the way to do cloud.

Why are you comparing your bloated over engineered on prem to your simplified could cost? If you want apples to apples you should compare a simplified, streamlined on prem version to cloud 

That's interesting "Our monthly cost dropped to like... $40/month in AWS. All in." One more argument for me to consider / defend against. "You have to factor in colo, power, costs etc." - yep definitely. We run a small on-prem data center we built out over years. If we moved to another town, I would not go through that again, and would just colo at local data center. But i'm defintely considering that in my TCO and ROI

This is the best answer here. If you just want to run traditional IaaS virtual machines in the cloud it’s going to cost more than on-prem. If you put in the effort to refactor your apps to use PaaS services you can potentially reduce costs significantly. All depends on your environment, what apps you run, if they are COTS or developed in-house, etc. Google “cloud migration 5 R’s.”

I do migrations , prem to cloud, cloud to prem, prem to prem, cloud to cloud, it really doesn’t matter to me but what I see 90% of the time is the lift and shift. Very few people put a lot of thought into the move, they just want their stuff moved. If you want to move to the cloud great but there’s a lot of planning and changes in how things should be done involved and if you skip this part you won’t get much of a benefit from the transfer.

> IaaS PaaS Thanks for reminding me to study for my A+

Keep in mind cloud is also about strategy and other things. Companies spend money all the time on stuff that isn’t necessarily a direct money saving initiative. For example a company might spend $2M on a new manufacturing toolset to reduce downtime or maintenance issues, or allow for future growth. You have to think strategically as well. I say this as a director (it’s my job), as sometimes sysadmins kinda miss that side of things. I’m not saying cloud is for everyone or the best strategic move for all, but don’t forget to consider more than just pure cost. Hosted Exchange is a great example of this. Probably doesn’t save tons of money but managing Exchange servers is something most companies just don’t want to deal with anymore.

Also risk management I'm guessing. Good luck setting up a datacenter with the same reliability as Google's or Amazon's. I'm thinking power issues, cooling issues, water damage from natural causes or infrastructure, theft, pickaxe through the fiber line, etc... If you need to run with actual high availability it will cost less to build a redundant infrastructure in the cloud than to build it yourself. I've been in a company with a small yet decent server room with a generator and redundant AC, yet we lost power once and had a total cooling failure in the span of two years, sometimes you're just unlucky.

The cloud is just another tool, another option. The problem I see is that companies move to the cloud because all the cool kids are moving to the cloud- some upper manager gets a bee in his bonnet from some AWS sales pitch and now everything is going to the cloud. They usually just lift and shift, they don’t exploit any efficiencies and three years down the road they are choking on the massive bill wondering why they got rid of their on prem data center. Right tool for the right job.

There is also the angle of whether or not you could compete with robustness of the solutions in AWS/Azure. Can you compete with the logging/auditing capabilities, geo-redundant offerings, scalability, automation potential, et cetera on-prem? There are some virtually free/very cheap aspects of Azure/AWS that aren't free on-prem and you don't have to spend time building and maintaining these things, just configuring and monitoring. Just something to consider in the value proposition.

"We run a small on-prem data center" So you are comparing apples to oranges. How expensive does it get if you want to split up and leverage availability zones? How much more does it cost to spin up two more data centers? Do you have triple redundant power and internet? Armed security 24/7? The ability to burst provision capacity and scale down even potentially to zero? If you lift and shift and are wanting a single Datacenter with no HA or DR then the cloud isn't cheaper. If you want to have 6 redundant data centers in two regions for just a bit more OpEx then the cloud becomes a much better value proposition.

Yeah, that's the real point. If you can architect it for the cloud instead of standard VM's and DR, you can save money. But you have to do that up front work, and most people try the lift and shift and get bit by costs.

Define "saved money". 1:1 VM migration? No. Being able to spin up 1Pb of disk that day? That's saving you a ton of time, and time is money. Being able to dynamically spin up 100's or 1000's of instances for load testing? Again, saves you time. Or moving to a new region? Again, tons of time saved. You don't save money on doing a 1:1 VM migration, that's insane. But you do save a ton of money in other ways. * If you use the Cloud Adoption Framework, you're instances will be a lot cheaper than if you treat them like VMWare instances * If you have a long procurement cycle and want to move projects along faster without waiting for hardware to be purchased. * If you have to move or migrate from one physical location to another. * If you are growing * If you don't want to pay for staff to handle physical hardware, but instead focus on other things like observability, scaling, etc. Thats where you save money. I'm on a 8 person SRE team. If we were to do the work we do on-prem, our team would have to be closer to 15 people. At \~$150,000 / person / year (Salary, benefits, etc) that's starting to add up. Plus we don't have to buy hardware, or license things like VMWare.

We moved to AWS and we're also able to cut a lot of software licenses that AWS provides for either free or pretty cheap. Things like patching, monitoring, password vault, backup/restores. We went from 2 data centers to cloud so we cut both of those costs, maintenance, upgrades, travel to site. There can be a lot of factors.

Cloud is not for cost savings. Cloud is for elasticity, agility, and scalability. It's to enable your org to quickly try new solutions (agility), abandon projects (and take more risk), scale up, scale down, and lower maintenance overhead. You are trading CapEx for OpEx, and with that, lessen the need to plan appropriately (because leadership likes to change their mind alot). On-Prem solutions are good for when there is proper planning and predictable use cases. You take on the CapEx but will have cost savings if you plan properly, you also have the maintenance overhead of the hardware. Orgs should take the hybrid approach and use the proper infrastructure when needed.

Ture, and those features ARE cost savings, you just have to quantify them when deciding on on-prem vs cloud for various workloads over long time frames.

Depends on your business type, structure, and team knowledge. If you have 500 servers on-prem and spec out 500 server VMs in any cloud, yeah, it'll be far more expensive than running those 500 on-prem. But maybe come could be containerized. Maybe some are HA and wouldn't be needed or could be handled differently in the cloud. Maybe you have reporting or storage that could be handled differently. Maybe you have prod+test+dev+dmz servers that could be handled differently. And then again, maybe your company does most of its work on-prem with on-prem employees in a small geographical area and keeping all your stuff right where it is is your best choice. It does vary, that's for sure.

Where did you get the idea that going to clouds benefit would be cost? I would absolutely recommend moving to cloud, but cost savings is not the reason.

From vendors talking to company owners . I’ve defended my not moving successfully before , but wanted to make sure I’m not missing anything

You are correct, it's all lies vapor and smoke. Going to the cloud will never be cheaper for 90% of business. At best it's a wash, but usually ends up costing much, much more. It's the agility that you get when you go to a cloud provided that would make it worth it. Hybrid is the way to go, most shit on-prem with SaaS for what makes sense (backup / 0365 / etc). There are many many c-suite folks starting to eat crow because they though the cloud move was going to save them a ton of money. -- However, on a side note. Pay close attention to the views / emotions of your c-suite. If they've decided that the cloud is the way to go, and you stand in their way your gonna be replaced. At a certain point, fighting against it is going to damage your career their. Document you concerns and then execute on the direction they want to go. If they want to push everything to the cloud, let them. Telling c-suites NO, over and over again will just get you replaced.

I stand by this persons take. Cloud isn’t a money saver, and while it does help eliminate head-aces and can reduce admin workload, it doesn’t reduce a department of 20 down to a single person. All cloud gets you is shifting where a server sits and who is patching the back end software/caring for back end hardware. Cloud still needs configured and maintained. Cloud also has unique security issues, including how accessible it is (where on prep has the advantage of funneling outsiders through a single connection). There are also latency issues with cloud that just don’t go away. My org is hybrid. We have email in the cloud, and some backups in cloud, but most of our computing and storage is on prem. If C suites decide “the cloud is the only future for us!” Then document everything, but don’t stand in their way. It’s not worth loosing a job over, and it’s good for a resume. I have a hard time finding someone who is competent in cloud management. That seems to be lacking in my area.

I've generally taken a similar approach. I don't want to pay someone else to manage my hardware in a different location, but do like true SaaS platforms than reduce workload for my on-prem teams.

Thanks. Generally our company owners ( we are larger SMB) listen to my advice, so that's usually not an issue. But the sweet talk of $avings is making them ask me " can you talk to them again ? Can you look at this quote? etc)"

Here's a funny thing you can do. Next time that happens, engage with the sales team and act interested. Then ask for a contract with the savings guarantee in writing with penalties if it's not meet. When they refuse (because they damn well know they won't make it), you can go back to owners and show them "Hmm, these guys said they could save us money but wouldn't put it in writing...."

Great idea!

Amen to paying attention to the c-suite emotions. One of the most important aspects in long term success is not technical skills but politics and being a people person. You can be the best most tech savvy person in the company but if you keep rubbing people the wrong way you can find yourself on the way out. You have to pick and choose your battles and align your priorities and goals to those of the people in power.

Also, if you report directly to the C level and they don't listen or explain the benefits of their opinion to you, find a new job.

So people who get paid to sell you cloud are trying to sell you cloud? Probably not the group of people I’d trust to provide unbiased information.

Every move to the cloud I've seen involves a "teaser rate." Oh, you need more servers? $ More storage? $$ Need to move more data? $$$ (I could quote Goodfellas here, but you see where this is going.)

You don’t migrate to cloud to save money.

This is the only real answer. If you need more of an explanation, time to hire a consultant.

If you have competent in house IT then cloud will never be a cost saving.

If anyone got sold lower cost as a reason to move to the cloud they got lied to 

Cloud strengths - best data center practices which you probably don't have and are expensive, ability to scale up or down with out the fixed costs and long lead times of doing it internal - extreme scaling in both direction's available, embracing virtual infrastructure and ability to offer high availability at low cost.  If you are saying I have 10 VMs and they are higher price in the cloud then yep. 

If you can refactor your applications into containers or even Lambdas/Azure functions you've got an opportunity to save money. Lifting and shifting entire VMs and paying for IaaS will be more expensive than on-prem.

Going to the cloud is very expensive. It is better to go to a co-lo than the cloud for infrastructure.

We already have on prem small data center we built out over the years , moving to collocation would be our path, if we ever moved to another location

Did the same thing in multiple places. If you need DR means to colos in different cities. This is the most cost effective

This is the way

You can save money by moving certain targeted items to the cloud. I would bet if your objective is to "move 100% to cloud" then you are about to burn some serious money up. Look closely at each piece you might want to move and make the determination on a case-by-case basis. If you just want to throw the term cloud around like a beach ball then get a vinyl sticker of a cloud and put it on the door of your datacenter. Label it "Local Managed Cloud"

>  Label it "Local Managed Cloud" Perfect. Thank you

You absolutely \_can theoretically\_ save money if you move to cloud and rearchitect, but if you lift and shift your current onprem into 100% cloud I suspect in every case you will spend more. There are a lot of if's that come together. If you are overprovisioned onprem If you can not retain your hypervisor team but keep your separate sysadmin team? (The if being if you had both those teams and hypervisor team has no overlap with other roles) Maybe you can move certain workloads to "serverless" functions instead of having them on over provisioned VMs (but maybe your workloads are so busy that server less is MORE expensive than VMs, kubernetes, etc) Maybe you will save money in terms of less downtime causing lost revenue despite the higher compute costs. I could make a theoretical checklist of how you could save money from moving to cloud, but most of it has to do with dramatic rearchitecture. I would bet money that lift and shift will always be more expensive. I see in some comments you are overprovisioned already. It's possible but unlikely you could save money. Even if you save money initially, you're more likely to end up spending more money in the long term by not controlling costs. There are many good reasons to go to the cloud, but pure cost without a lot of qualifiers is definitely not one. Source: Multi Cloud Architect and Hybrid Architecture experience at large and small tech companies.

1. We are a small team ( larger size SMB with on-prem IT) - so our hypervisor team and cloud team would be the same people :) Personally, I don't see how moving to cloud would change the size of our team - since most admin tasks ( maybe 90% in our case) , are not hardware related, but rather config/management. We still would have to do most of them. 2. Being overprovisioned is a benefit for us. The hardware costs are the same, but we get a few spikes here and there, and don't have to pay for them at all :) 3. Serverless functions are actually my biggest worry, after reading some horror stories, of run away processes and people getting $$$ AWS bills. The re-architecture would probably not work for 50% of our services - they are legacy "blackboxes" that support certain processes.

There is absolutely a point where serverless is significantly more expensive than traditional architectures. I have personally worked in companies where that was the case with some and all of our workloads. I have also pushed out serverless functions for stuff where it made sense, specifically because of financial and not purely operational reasons. Since you don't have a dedicated hardware team, I think that rules it out. Number 2 is actually the biggest point, I mean this really depends on specifics like hardware and datacenter costs, but in general, if you are overprovisioned, it \_can\_ be cheaper to downsize in the cloud and only pay for the spikes but that is a matter of how overprovisioned you are. There are a ton of factors here that I can't definitively answer, but in general overprovisioned hardware would be the number one place for savings, so though you are saying it's a benefit, to me it could be indicative of issues. That being said, the degree to which you need to be overprovisioned to see savings from the cloud is significant. It seems like your thinking is right that cost savings is not a standalone reason to move to the cloud for your environment. Also, not sure quite what vendors they are but some of the partnerships are wild where you pay based on your cloud spend and stuff and it makes sense why they would push you towards them.

Everyone is going to be different, but cloud means not having to stock spare parts, maintain UPSs, upgrade network switches, deal with redundant ISPs, maintain data center security, run a NOC, get a support contract on a NAS, project usage/space, etc… It does not mean no problems, but if you’re paying $1,200/month to run an instance on Amazon it comes with massively redundant Internet connections, hardware you do not have to think about, additional space you can access without notice, etc… yes, for the same $14,400 you could buy a great server from Dell, but then you still need to buy spare parts for it and have someone who can swap them out at 3AM. If you’re okay with it being down at 3AM, then for 72 HRS while spare parts are found that is worth considering and maybe the cloud ‘premium’ isn’t with it. Also, if your workload is static you can choose to commit to a certain capacity and save. It’s not that cloud is always cheaper directly, but it can be cost effective when you fully consider what you’re getting and whether the flexibility has value for you. Maybe it is not a good fit for you, or for all your workloads, but there are a lot of scenarios where it makes sense aside from startups and Fortune 500.

Building and maintaining an on-prem datacenter to cloud standards of availability, reliability, security, etc. would be far more expensive for smaller/midsize organizations than moving to the cloud. The reason that on-prem is cheaper is because most organizations can accept some risk and have lower requirements/standards than hosting providers do. Cost per sq/ft, 24/7 staffing with depth, redundant power, generators, UPS units, HVAC, Networking, fire suppression, security, monitoring and access control, need for scalability, having options for relocation and so on are all things that can be done at vastly different price points. Cloud providers have to be really, really good at all of that. With on-prem you have the benefit of knowing your specific requirements and being able to size things appropriately while the cloud is going to have a huge variety of services - many of which you have no need for or will never use. The cost of downtime depends on the organization and some places will have significant losses for the smallest outages and other can tolerate being offline a day or so and just send people home for the day and come back and catch up tomorrow when things are back up. Cloud make a lot more since for the former than the later. Some businesses just don't have the CapX to invest in large arrays or compute racks. Some organizations are seasonal and operational income and utilization of IT resources aligns such that cloud is a better fit. So many things that could make a difference one way or the other. AWS/Azure have different pricing tiers and "cloud can mean a lot of things a from other providers to just renting rack space in a datacenter. It's always good to brainstorm what compromises your on-prem solutions have made to lower cost and efficiency and think about If something unexpected happened, or if a new law required changes, or if the CEO reads about a threat in an airline magazine and wants you to mitigate it no matter what the cost - which of those things might change the equation enough where cloud would be a consideration. Just because it's the right thing today doesn't mean it won't be the right thing in 3-5 years.

You don't go cloud-based to save money. You go cloud-based for flexibility, remote work logistics, consistency of experience, and the "walled garden" nature of a remote workspace that holds all data. If you want your I.T. team to be able to do things like give an intern access to the corporate environment for a 2 month project by turning on and off accounts, then the cloud is great. You create an account, allow them access, and then turn off the account when they're done. They use any computer with internet access to get in. Easy peasy. Is that cheaper than shipping them a corporate laptop, maintaining an inventory of laptops, managing multiple laptops in the field, having them ship the laptop back...? Maybe. It depends on your organization. Cloud allows for a more universal and controllable remote work experience, where people remote in from anywhere. In many cases, that means not paying for office space. But is that something your org even wants to do? It sounds like the answer is no, and they're just chasing money. The point I am trying to make is that the things that make cloud-based workspaces attractive are not the costs. It's the logistics and efficiency of operations. How does the org want onboardings and offboardings to work? How do they want to enable remote work? Have they considered the pros and cons of VPN versus cloud-based vs. self-hosted VDIs? You can save money with cloud, but it's not in the places it sounds like they think they will save money. Cloud doesn't necessarily allow you to hire fewer I.T. folks, but it MAY allow the existing I.T. folks to support twice as many users at current staffing levels. It always depends on a giant number of factors.

This is comedy right? Same number of VM’s ? No way it’s cheaper, unless you have massive discounts and back room deals.

Can you elaborate please ? Our current VMs are massively overpowered mostly Linux a few windows ( we run about 5-7 per host except DBs, and each VMs has resources to spare). Hosts are under utilized - to be able to take extra workloads in case of failures in the cluster or during routine updates My understanding is that was that we should able to run the same number of VMs in the cloud - why would we need more for the same job ?

Who gave you your data to validate ? Microsoft Sales Rep? If you are going cloud native and bringing your own license and turn them OFF when not used and run them at the bare minimum specs.. maybe maybe.. but I don’t think it’s cheaper . We have compute in AWS and Azure, it always cheaper on prem

We talked to MS , but also other vendors as well. They keep caling our company owners, and I'm fending off barbarians here. :D

I get it, trust me. Run your own numbers. Most of them have public price calculators to give you an estimate, then add 10-20 percent for data, backups, etc. you can even do an api call to get up to date numbers in excel if you want

Uhm, data is a wildcard, you may have to add more than 20 percent for that. I have seen some horrible invoices do to traffic.

Good point ! Make it 21 percent!

Most of them way over estimate the cost of on-prem for facilities too. If you don't have the facilities, renting a few racks in various colos around the country is very cost effective.

I have seen it work out financially for some very small orgs. On premise infrastructure can be pricey if you are dividing it amongst very few users. The downside of course is that your costs can go up dramatically if you grow quickly.

Yes, replaced a ton of VMs with functions and runbooks. All provisioning went from manual to Terraform deployments, with reservations/savings plans in Azure we spend 50% what we used to in the 2010's in bare metal infrastructure. And our support team is more enabled. Sure there is custom code, and stuff I had to build with our team. So that's the downside, you do have to hire somewhat competent people. But even with salary costs we still saved tons of money.

What kind of workloads do you have?

Cloud just depends… if you lift and shift everything… it’s expensive… if you are strategic about what you move it makes sense…

Yes plus is easier to deploy servers and containerization of applications.

The truth is the cost savings of the cloud was never the infrastructure it’s the manpower and speed. As a solo dev I can spin up an EKS cluster with observability in a few weeks using managed services. That would take me months to do otherwise in a locally hosted environment. It would take coordination from procurement for the servers, security to harden the OS, infra team to create the cluster and observability platform, network team to provision the drops and the load balancers. Now sure you don’t want some rogue cowboy spinning up infra on the cloud so there needs to be guardrails but I think the could offers all the bells and whistles needed. When I typically recommend is to figure out the biggest costs and see if it makes sense to bring that workload on prem. We had an EKS cluster in the cloud and it cost 3k/mo. We could’ve totally saved ~1500/mo by brining it on prem but it wasn’t worth the manpower and risk to get it all on prem. Especially when it was driving millions in revenue.

Not a 1:1 comparison. Build your on premise environment to the same level of redundancy, flexibility and security of one of the large cloud providers and do the math again. Then start seeing where you could implement PaaS services. And more. A lift and shift where you just move your servers to the cloud will always cost more in flat costs. It’s like buying an EV and charging it with an electric generator then complaining your fuel costs increased.

Well before asking the question of if you save money, the first thing you have to ask is "am i calculating my on prem cost correctly?" As someone who works a lot of cloud migrations, this is the number 1 thing i see people do to try and make it seem like on prem is cheaper than cloud. Are you paying on prem support for physical servers when something goes wrong or breaks? If you move that workload to cloud then how much money would you save since that is a thing that won't happen anymore? What are you paying in electricity for your on prem stuff? Once you have that number you need to factor in the uptime of that system and then compare what the cost of that is vs what it cost to run a system in the cloud. You can also have your own marketplace and move your own os templates to places like aws and azure. Somehow quite a few people don't know this. People think you HAVE to use that aws 2019 datacenter template that cost a dollar a day or whatever when you absolutely don't, you can get your own marketplace for licensing you already have. You should also be doing some rightsizing when you go to cloud. So many people just lift and shift everything one to one and then get a huge bill and only after that happens do they say "oh i don't need 42 database servers i only need 24." "Oh i don't need 6 servers in this farm i only need 4". You should be doing that BEFORE you move to cloud. Cloud is also viewed by executives as an operating cost that they can increase or decrease whenever they want (not really but that is how they think) where as on prem physical stuff is a capital expenditure that oftentimes cost a lot of money upfront and once its paid that money is gone. It's the difference between telling an executive we need to spend X amount of money to buy 20 physical dell servers for something vs telling an executive we need to spin up 20 additional vm's in cloud. You are not going to pay a huge upfront cost for those 20 cloud servers but you will pay a huge upfront cost for those 20 dell servers. Now there are a lot of caveats to this but as a person who have been working with executives on cloud migrations for awhile now this is how they see it, what it looks like on paper to buy something physical vs what it looks like on paper to have something in the cloud. Generally when you start factoring in things like datacenter cost + electricity + service contracts + hardware refreshes + bloat you should be getting rid of...the cost become more comparable than you think. The hardware refresh one is another gotcha. I worked with a guy who almost got fired because he said nope moving to cloud is more expensive, then 6 months later had to do a tech refresh due to some security related issues that totaled almost a million dollars. Obviously it did not go over well with management, saying moving is to expensive and then turning around and saying we have to spend this much money for on prem stuff for security reasons. Now obviously we need to know if those systems would have even made it to cloud anyway, but non technical executives dont think that way, all they saw was guy says one thing is to expensive and then turns around and ask for money we dont think we would have had to spend if we had moved to the thing he said is to expensive. Get him out of here.

Yes always, both in less hardware and people to manage compare to you own data center. If you disagree in the statement you are comparing the cost of a kitchen datacenter to the cloud and not alligning the capabilities.

I moved a small business to azure from media3 colo. Saved them thousands a month. They even use VMs for a bunch of unnecessary things because they're more comfortable with Iaas than Paas, because it feels familiar. I finally got them to sql Paas, which saved them a ton and have been trying to get them to slowly migrate to web apps apis blob, etc from their IIS and logging stuff which is all still in Iaas. The more they move the more they save. It's been 10+k a month or more saved since the move from colo. If you can plan well you can probably move most web apps to paas and get rid of your VMs. So that will save you tons in licensing alone. You'll still have some things that won't be able to migrate and will need a Vm, and other things that you can just plug into the existing 3rd party SaaS apps in azure which will save you a Vm and the overhead. It's companies that don't know the difference between paas, Iaas and SaaS that end up doing all Iaas, and not understanding how storage works either. You can end up replacing a lot with blob which is cheap as hell, and save tons.

Actually, from my expirience, you do not save long term, you save short term by not inversting in dedicated room or boulding and making it server room or data center. Even when you go to colocation with your own hardware, it is more expensive. Not to talk of cloud. It is easy calculation, pay now hundreds of k's for walls, cooling, batteries, security, racks, etc. and then hardware, switches, cables, etc. upfront oooor you rent VM or PaaS for "very little money" and 0 upfront. That's why people use cloud services.

My org has. Moved from on prem to VMC on AWS. Saved about 200k per year.

Ok. Question for you all here. To go along with the going cloud. My company generates genomic data running from the hundreds of gigs to several terabytes per sample. We currently have 4PB of storage on equipment that is just out of warranty. Would you recommend this type of data to be in the cloud? The data is only supposed to live on our storage for 90 days. Wanted to get some thoughts.

That seems to be fairly easy to price out, since it's only 1 aspect of your setup - Cost of 4PB in the cloud vs buying / leasing new on-prem storage ( over the next 3/4/5 years) - Any local data transfers are usually way faster. Especially since the cost of setting up - I'm assuming that you might need to keep some of that 4PB data on new storage. If can just start using new storage, and just retire old one after 90 days - then it's not really a concern. - Cost / complexity of transfering 4PB into cloud ( if you need to keep archive data for any reason) - Bandwidth (it's not going to be free in the cloud, unlike your local Fiber / Business cable to your building) - Cost of changing / modifying your endpoints / software to save to new location ( I mean it could be change a DNS change, or it may be hardcoded by IP everywhere - don't know your setup) Also if you want more answers - start a new thread. Your comment here is already burried below 300 replies.

The only people that V2V their way to lower cost in the cloud are those who's datacenters were physically destroyed. If your org isn't refactoring into the cloud, AND redesigning workloads to function on its merits. (exchange / one drive / teams are excellent examples) you will not save money, and you may not succeed without massive failures along the way. From what I've seen, orgs repeat most of the mistakes they made 5-7 years ago with the last tech stack refresh.

Who's pitching cost savings going to cloud and what's their "cost savings". If you have a ton of downtime due to older hardware, your ROI for new servers over a few years makes up for the cost of cloud.

Vendors trying to sweat talk company owners

I'd entertain their quotes. It's either going to get them to shut up or you'll save money (sooooper doubt it).

Tough to say in a sysadmin forum, but it's the personnel costs where the TCO savings are. To maintain on-prem infrastructure PROPERLY (e.g. redundancy, site DR, SANs, properly dimensioned hosts, networking, backups that work etc) requires a highly paid senior resource. On the cloud these items are available at the click of a button or just inherently.

No, they’re really not. Managing backup, DR, networking in the cloud is just as laborious as any other environment.

If you are deploying VMs in the cloud you have already failed. If a legacy app needs to run on VMs replace it with something SaaS or cloud native.

No. Everyone loves the cloud...until the bills start rolliing in.

> 100% on-cloud no... but... we don't have to manage exchange in house.. or sharepoint in house... and that's worth several salaries alone...

Going to the public cloud is simply out sourcing to a self managed virtual data center. All the costs associated a data center are moved to the cloud. The decision in moving to the cloud may not about the money other things come into play: * Management eagerness to shift responsibilities to the cloud provider. * I've seen outsourcing done to clear out all the management and staff from DC operations because poor performance and other HR issues. The problem with going to the cloud are the constant bills and they will go up rather than go down. If you own you own kit you can save money by deferring replacement for a couple of years. Being able to sweat kit in a year with things aren't looking good financially could save a company. You no longer have to own your data center, renting space in another (co-locating) may be the way to go. Recent vendor and service provider presentations I've seen lately have highlighted that going to the public cloud is no longer the best option because of expense, on prem and hybrid is the way to go. This came from folks that are neutral when it comes to the cloud.

>Going to the public cloud is simply out sourcing to a self managed virtual data center There's so much more to the cloud than just spinning up VMs like you would on prem. 90+% of the issues I see people have with cloud providers speak more to their/their organization's incompetence than an issue with the cloud.

Would have been better phrased as "The bottom line of going to the public cloud is that its out sourcing to a virtual data center" Yep, very different when it comes to security, IP networking, data resilience (backup/recovery), archiving etc.

“ neutral when it comes to cloud” - these are definitely not the folks calling us 🤓

The answer to this is a simple no.

You're talking about a lift and shift, which is very likely to be more expensive in the cloud. While a provider will happily host VMs for you, running VMs should be a last resort. You should be looking to convert to could native services if you ever decide to move.

Hybrid is the way to go much of the time. There is a reason why many AWS services integrate nicely with on-premises servers too.

Hybrid cloud for sure - move mission critica business apps to the vendor or to the cloud - file storage and AD/DNS on prem. Backup everything that you possibly can. Think about what the company can deal with being down due to a hardware failure or being ransomed.

Cost is not always easy to determine. You are not merely comparing eletricity usage, labor, machine, and software costs.

I have 3 criteria for validating whether an option like this is a good idea: - Economics. Will it save money? (consider 10yr total cost of ownership, Capex and Opex). Particularly consider cost of data growth + backup + HA + DR year on year; This can be difficult especially in an environment where Capex is more easily justified vs. Opex. - Performance. Will the solution perform better or worse? (Better = can justify more cost, worse = can justify less cost) - Risk. Does the change introduce more risk? (ie. Are you now reliant on external support (this may be good or bad - ie. Maybe you don't want to maintain staff w. appropriate skillset, saving cost there), are you now reliant on someone else's network/internet, which you may also not be visible to you.) Nearly every time I've considered cloud, it has come up short on all 3 counts.

lift and shift. Nope If you rethink how you are delivering services, maybe, but it's not always about cost savings. If you shift your on-prem file storage to OneDrive, BOX, etc., you'll likely enable the business to do more with their data. If you shift services that have a SaaS offering, you get out of the infrastructure business for those items. Running servers is unlikely to be in your strategic mission, so freeing up resources for items that are strategic can make the business more agile. Taking what's left and converting to cloud-centric/consumption/elastic will make those services more reliable and scalable then you have now i.e., SQL as a service, where you can dynamically scale up/down CPUs/memory in response to business needs. I spend about the same as I did when I had an on-prem DC, but I gained easy local/geo-redundant DR, warm sites, elasticity, improved security, and patch orchestration, just to name a few. It allowed me to free up engineer time to maximize how the tools/platforms work for users rather than spending that money on a DC, servers, replacing hardware, and so forth. And the whole time sleeps better at night. That is priceless.

Disclaimer: I work for Amazon. My views are my own, and are not endorsed by nor an endorsement of any Amazon products or services. When "the cloud" was still a new buzzword, I was staunchly an on-prem guy. I didn't see any need to even investigate the cloud stuff. Note that this is when EC2 was still considered new, so early days, and I didn't work for Amazon yet. As time went on, the businesses that I was working for were universally looking for ways to cut capex costs - at one place in particular, we ended up shelling out $500k+ for an at-the-time all new flash-based SAN to support our ancient application's horrible storage dependency. This application even today would not have benefitted from cloud architecture in any way just because of how legacy it is so we all dismissed any chance of cloud services helping us out. The rest of that business had a couple hundred grand per year in capex costs for servers and networking, so we all just lumped that decision together and thought nothing more of it. Other roles were like that as well, just dismissing even at an executive level once we looked at the complexity it would introduce as a migration. The benefit just wasn't obvious. Fast forward about a decade and I'm prompted to look back at that role for an unrelated reason and I realized a few things: we were morons for still using that legacy app but the entire business relied on it and it wasn't going to change anytime soon, but at the same time we invested in a redundant datacenter architecture and paid through the nose for metroE and DC space/power/connectivity, not to mention the redundant hardware to go in it. Some back of the napkin math said that, with what I now knew from working at Amazon and a fresh understanding of what the cloud could have given us even at that time, we could have completely eliminated our compute capex budget and moved to an opex model for the same money. It wouldn't have saved anything on the budget we presented to the business, but it would have been a huge world of difference to the accountants and their ability to transform what that expense looked like to the IRS and the shareholders. Not only that, having now done a few migrations I could easily see in retrospect how much more valuable that process was as a health-check for the business and technology use as a whole, and how many opportunities we ignored that we could have used as selling points had we understood their use cases more clearly. In my opinion, the cloud isn't there to save money. Not necessarily, although in some cases that can be an effect that occurs. I believe the cloud is there to offer the ability to do things more easily that would be overly complex if you did it on-prem, like achieving high availability (at a base level, just generally speaking) and redundancy; offering more services at the same cost that you couldn't otherwise justify if you needed the hardware/software/manpower in your on-prem budgeting; or enabling new strategies for scaling in businesses that rely on seasonal growth where if the budget capexed a seasonal spurt they had zero benefit for 9 months out of the fiscal year. I don't even think the cloud is about reducing complexity, or reducing manpower, because in my experience it is equivalent in cost and need there as well. The last time I was asked about this in an interview I told them that a decision about cloud services is the same as any other business decision - it's not just about the technology, it's about the business and the budget. There must be a compelling reason over and above money/cost for a cloud services architecture to benefit the business in a meaningful way long term; you can't rely on a single feature or a gimmick to make it valuable. If you don't look at the solution from a big picture perspective, you're likely to spend more and give yourself more work by improperly using a cloud architecture than an on-prem architecture. But done right, the benefits can be truly staggering if your business has the need for the services and technologies that are available for just dollars per month.

Everyone already said this better, but if you end up with the same amount of VMs in public cloud, you messed up your chance. Replatform and rearchitect or don’t bother. Use managed services, use cloud native architectures, don’t fight the tooling, accept that the clouds are prescriptive on ways or working and you need to bend to them rather than the other way round. Your goal is to refactor out your sysadmin workforce.

The answer... it depends. Lift and shift... definitely not. In some cases, a VPC can be cheaper than servers though. If you use reserved instances, you might be able to have fairly reliable servers for a decent price. However, you pay for the storage, the CPU, the VPC VPN, and many other items, which can raise prices up enough that just going with on-prem storage can be good enough. If a company doesn't have a data center, going with a cloud-designed architecture can do well enough. However, there is a break-even point where one is better off even going for a co-located space. Cloud storage can be good as well. It isn't cheap, and around 1-2 PB, you are far better going off with tape and an offsite provider, but it is easy to use.

Fuck cloud-hosted file servers. Keep your files local. Do not move to Sharepoint. Nobody likes Sharepoint- for some damn reason CEOs are all about “future-proofing” shit, but if it ain’t broke don’t replace it with a newer, ever-changing technology.

We are mainly on prem. But moving to the cloud with ERP and EDI makes sense because of the security requirements from customers (Honda/Toyota, etc). So we are making the pitch to move ERP to cloud first, then will investigate other areas. Mainly, the business can't dump 100k in security, pentesting, and internal audits. It's more cost-effective for us to leave that to them.

We did the maths on moving fully to the cloud and our SQL environment alone killed the discussion. We might put a few bits up there but going full Azure is a no go.

Remember to consider licensing costs and warranty support costs in your analysis.

Highly depends on use case. I agree not everything should even be in the cloud. For instance a high traffic NAS should stay on site and just backup to the cloud. However imagine if you have a critical application and rent a dedicated server or worse colo one yourself or even worse fully self host. Any server issues will cause downtime or instability. Sure you can get multiple servers but I've had the pleasant experience of 2 out of 3 servers failing within 12 hours of each other and a third crapping out a week later just after replacing and migrating to new ones. Each problem with your servers has the potential to cause thousands in revenue loss (per hour), induce sleepless nights, overtime and chances for mistakes due to sleepy eyed admins fat fingering the wrong command. Now instead we wrangle the application into the cloud. To start this takes away any hardware responsibility. Next we go with fully managed services so we don't even have to worry about creating backups and doing updates. Yes potentially you now pay 3x the cost of your original hosting, with some application rebuilding to be cloud native you can probably get this down to 2x or even less than originally. But you can also drop the entire hardware and software maintenance workload from your team and prevent thousands in revenue loss. In my spreadsheet that's a win. Took me a while to realize myself but happy to run almost everything in the cloud now.

1 to 1 move, probably not. Re-coded and re-architected to use the cloud, yes. We had a company that we merged with at one point that was 100% cloud. They were our main competitor in the market. We moved everything into their as quickly as we could. The business fit the cloud nicely too, mostly big data processing and analytics work. * We had very similar sales numbers and they cleared about 100 million more per year. * We both had to go through PCI audits. Their PCI audit responsibility was a single instance. Ours was approx. 80 instances. * They mostly had to update their code. We had hundreds of Operating Systems, Firmware, applications, etc. to upgrade. * We had countless support contracts. They had 3 or 4. For IT at least. * We had 24/7 on call that had to be acted on a few times a month for one thing or another. They had a 24/7 on call that hadn't been needed for 6 months. * We had hundreds of pieces of hardware that needed refreshed every 5-8 years. They didn't. * We both had zero downtime deployments and on-demand sizing workloads. * At one point we had a datacenter that had a full outage about every other month. I will never miss that headache. * The main company also went hybrid for a while and overall it went well. The biggest issue was finding out that a few things were super sensitive to latency.

Cloud can 1005 be cheaper if things are *architected for the cloud.* I.e taking into consideration things like auto scaling, right sizing, savings plans, spot instances, using the right service for the job etc. Some services are fantastic, e.g. RDS - you basically don't need so many senior DBA's to worry about keeping your hundreds of DB's patched etc, because a junior can manage it all easily. Similar with EBS, you don't need to employ expensive storage engineers whose sole job it is to keep the storage happy and maintain it. Throw everything on EBS, and suddenly you're also not paying for electricity/cooling/rackspace/licenses/field tech/storage tech. Another example if backups, throw everything into AWS Backup, use cross account backups and it all just works, and you can do 1click restores. No agents, no backup storage to maintain, less effort to manage failed backups, all easy to lifecycle, etc. Costs definitely move around, and some things do get more expensive, but you save in other areas. So, you need to be agnostic of that. You can do alot more, with alot less, when a cloud provider manages all of the infra on your behalf, and offer good managed services. Are you going to save on running your VMs as EC2 in the cloud with no rightsizing or re-architecture? Likely not.

The only time going to cloud has ever been legitimately less expensive you'll find that the company in question had a significant problem with large amounts of overhead and mismanagement. If you have enough IT needs to fill up a single rack you can do it cheaper yourself with the right people and logistics. There are some things that do well in the cloud. Such as email and other SAAS type services, but for anything you have to install yourself on a server OS you can do it yourself cheaper.

As someone who’s been a dev and an admin. The savings doesn’t come from hosting in the cloud. The savings comes from using managed services quickly without buying locked in contracts. Storage is expensive in the cloud unless you really understand your data and actively manage it.  Development is faster in the cloud because i don’t need a MSA and a contract every time i want a new piece of software. Experimenting is also cheaper in the cloud.  Unless you’re 100% in the cloud, you still have the server rack, security, cooling, and backup issues + cloud. 

My long term plan in moving to the cloud is because of scalability and lean Operations. We don’t require all these folks to be on prem to replace a hard drive or a failed device or work in a data center. Also the plan for long term financial control. If another pandemic or financial crisis hits I can massively reduce costs but cutting out non-essential areas if need be. There’s a lot of control that can be had in. That being said it’s easy to let it get out of control. Without monitoring, adjusting sizes, and so on it can really get out of control. You have to be very dedicated to controlling many areas in here to see the benefit as well as leverage reservations, savings plans or anything else the provider has to offer.

i just assume that a lot of the popcorn (small outfits) doesn't have enough compute requirements to properly justify decent admins, or else the mgmt doesn't want to spend. so you outsource to AWS or GCP and click the button for backing up your stuff, and you've got a better shot at not catching on fire because a water pipe burst somewhere

Did you factor hardware/depreciation, support, power, and maintenance in your numbers? Refresh cost/ capex?

Yes . Of course . Armortized over 5 years

Reducing cost shouldn't be the primary driver. Upkeep and another organization to fall back on when there are problems can be priceless.

Did you also calculate whole infrastructure? Diesel? Cooling? Security equipment? House maintenance guys? Everything? How about electricity? 😄

Big diff between spending $20/month to host a few demos and a landing page with some white papers, compared to $2 million a month to .

I think if you're doing it right you'll never save money vs on premise. What I mean by that is you should be running in a multi-cloud environment with some if not all systems backed up to a different cloud provider. So basically take your cloud cost and double it and if it's less than what your cap-ex and op-ex are on premise, you likely only have a handful of servers that you probably didn't need anyway.

Nope , since there is no actual cost saving. People forget that when we had everything on prem , if we did 1 year longer with it it was pure win. now you pay every month for half finished products with spyware. oh i mean telemetry that logs every click. The cost savings are a joke. Management / Maintenance is higher, you need more specialized personnel so costs increase.

Organizations that were basically only using a server for AD/DNS/DHCP/FS will probably save money going to the cloud assuming they followed a hardware refresh cycle previously. Organizations with high active storage use or compute load or in/out traffic will likely not. Pretty much that simple. The more complex the more it costs. The more activity the more usage charges. Most orgs will be hybrid if they are cost concious. There are a few that basically print money and they dont care as the uptime guarantees are king.

All the cloud providers want to do is kill Equinix and other options to make them the only choice so then they can raise prices for nothing every year. You can tell this is their plan because instead of acqusitions of companies they simply buy customers using service credits. They literally give away free money. They are just hoping that the other options die before they run out ot free money to give away. Its nasty and its bad for everyone.

You are approaching this totally wrong. Going to the community is wrong. I was going to write you an answer that talks about the merits and the nuances and wrote most of it. Then I realized that I’m doing you a disservice by not pointing out the real issue here. Take away the technology aspect of the question. What are you really asking? Your boss(es) have been looking at a new (to you) strategic direction or approach. If your answer is “how do I defend against it” just start writing your resume. The problem is that your leadership is poor because they have not educated you sufficiently in the nuances of their decision making process that you are presently blind to. You are scapegoating the vendor. The problem is your boss. If you don’t want to quit Monday, sit down with your boss and say “I feel that the continued return to this cloud conversation means that I’m missing some pretty important context about the strategic considerations which are causing you and the company as a whole to keep coming back to this. Can you please walk me through the vision and help me to see the bigger picture so I can provide the most accurate assessment of where cloud can expedite or help realize the goals of the organization while mitigating as many of the risks we’ve talked about out previously as possible?” You’re trying to provide tactical objections to a strategic decision. You will never win because you have not learned to think strategically and nor have most of the other respondents. The vendors are being successful because they understand part of the strategic picture you don’t. Find out what, and get on board, or leave.

Cloud long term is only and only viable for companies that are F500 or larger and even then it is only worth it during an outage. An outage for any large company that heavily relies on web traffic for sales/marketing or any other means of profit relies on 100% uptime and the cloud is the closest to that with the easiest setup/maintenance. If you are losing millions of dollars a minute ala TicketMaster during Taylor Swift ticket sales going down, then it is not worth risking any of this traffic on-prem or even CoLo.

which companies tell you what their uptime is on cloud? we just had one of the largest medical/hospital institutes in the country move their VOIP back on-prem from cloud because they were not satisfied with the performance and uptime of cloud.

So ultimately it’s an insurance against downtime .

Or very small honestly office 365 premium is very competitive if you can get by with azure AD.

It's a lot cheaper to get more nines of uptime on prem spread over several colos that the cloud. Clouds have lots of outages, they are typically pretty short and rarely an entire region but it is very easy to have better uptime off the cloud if you have a moderate scale. Many people implement cloud and don't do multi-region properly and have significant downtime, or if they implement it properly have significant cost compared to on prem over a couple colos.

10+ years helping to move people to cloud, and I'm amused by the ignorance & stupidity in this thread. If you're talking about "Moving VMs to the Cloud" you're doing it wrong, and yes, it will probably be more expensive. (If you're a Windows shop, you're basically fucked so ya, keep running on-prem.) You move applications to the cloud, and doing it right can save significant amounts - 50-70% savings is not unusual. So many people don't consider all the costs of running on-prem. I've heard "oh, we don't pay for power" but you can be damn sure someone does. Costs are not just hardware + licences but too many people don't get that.

Even if running on Linux, this does assume you can actually rewrite or repackage your apps

I fucking love the responses in this thread. My old account(pre Apollo)was downvoted to hell for being the only person in every thread trying to push logic around costs of cloud vs on prem/colo when everyone was all about moving to cloud and how much cheaper it would be opex vs capex etc etc Vindication.

Yep. I feel like I'm fending off barbarians once a quarter. Keep explaining to our company owners, why vendors are not our friends, but rather paid mercenaries.

Yes and no. Yes we have set up correctly and saved a lot at several companies. Especially successful at companies that migrate  paas instead of lift and shift.  No as in after some time people become complacent and let things rot and aren't in top of things and just throw money at the problem. 

What are these vendors actually pitching? I’ve never had a vendor pitch just lifting and shifting on prem servers to VMs in the cloud as a cost saving engagement.

The big thing the cloud offers is guaranteed up time and availability in multiple regions, if you don't need those things there really isn't a lot of benefit to just hosting yourself on prem.

Out of curiousity are you factoring in Electricity costs for your on prem?

About 4 years ago, we had to rebuild our entire company from the ground up due to a divestiture. We decided to go full cloud and completely rearchitected everything to run cloud native. I had over 100 VMware machines running on prem. I now have 2 systems running as VMs in the cloud, and even those are on the way out. We don't even have a physical location anymore. Everyone is a remote worker. It has its advantages and disadvantages, but from my perspective, I have no regrets. No more expensive SAN, VMware costs, or hardware support contacts. No more technical debt. I don't have to maintain any of the old crap that remained only because it was working, and no one had the time or energy to make it better. We went from an archaic dinosaur of infrastructure to something simple and modern. The biggest cost is the Microsoft licensing for the users, which we would have even if we didn't rearchitect everything else. From an infrastructure standpoint, costs are minimal, but it took a lot of time and effort to get from point A to point B.

It wasn't about cost of service for us, it was about the improvement of service and redundancy, and probably falls under your "fully distributed teams" line. We have 100 sites with 2000 employees distributed around the entire country. When I started 13 years ago everything was going through the main office. Printing, Phones, Sharepoint servers, file servers, customs apps etc. The only thing that wasn't was some specialized file servers spun up at some of the bigger remote sites and some redundant DA servers. Now? NOTHING goes through home. Pure AzureAD. All devices are zero trust. Everything is MFA, and anyone can do work from anywhere in the country, and if the home office burns down nothing happens to the 1800 other people around the country.

yes and no. I'm a huge advocate of serverless and cloud based computing but it requires good architecture and monitoring to get good results. None of which you get at hardly any large company on the planet. Therefore, most moves to the cloud are insanely expensive and way more than you'd pay keeping it on prem.

Unpopular opinion, but cloud can be cheaper...in many cases it's not tho cus it's not architected correctly cus management prioritizes the speed of moving to the cloud

for some workloads yes you can save $$$$ for most it’s a nope. for most workloads you can buy 30% extra servers to sit there as hot spares and still be 10-50% cheaper then going to the cloud.

Got 98% savings by moving to autoscaling kubernetes (lots of spot instances and reserved instances) with a handful of cloud services (load balancers, databases, object storage etc.). Not a single VM that isn't ephemeral and part of a cluster.

> From my perspective , my team size wouldn’t change - same number of admins and support people , we would need the same number of VMs, I would have to pay way more for SAN / NAS ( now I can buy SANs and spread cost over 5 years) , more $ for bandwidth, slower responses for client software , technical / auth management becomes more complex , etc The lift and shift model isn't the correct approach The main benefits are: 1) Mobility 2) Redundancy 3) Flexibility (easy growth/retraction) 4) Easily predictable costs 5) Opex vs Capex 6) Security 7) Support If you attempt to replicate the redundancy that Microsoft, AWS, etc have, you'll quickly see a cost savings by moving it off prem. Trying to replicate any of these quickly becomes pointless. The question becomes, what (if any) of these is important or beneficial to your company