Are clouds having their on-prem moment?

From the post:

Companies are looking at other, more cost-effective options, including managed service providers and co-location providers (colos), or even moving those systems to the old server room down the hall. This last group is returning to “owned platforms” largely for two reasons.

First, the cost of traditional compute and storage equipment has fallen a great deal in the past five years or so. If you’ve never used anything but cloud-based systems, let me explain. We used to go into rooms called datacenters where we could physically touch our computing equipment — equipment that we had to purchase outright before we could use it. I’m only half kidding.

When it comes down to renting versus buying, many are finding that traditional approaches, including the burden of maintaining your own hardware and software, are actually much cheaper than the ever-increasing cloud bills.

Second, many are experiencing some latency with cloud. The slowdowns happen because most enterprises consume cloud-based systems over the open internet, and the multi-tenancy model means that you’re sharing processors and storage systems with many others at the same time. Occasional latency can translate into many thousands of dollars of lost revenue a year, depending on what you’re doing with your specific cloud-based AI/ML system in the cloud.

I work at a company with a presence in AWS, GCP, Azure, Aliyun, and global data centers we operate.

I've learned, yes, you can save money - but only if you're good at forecasting workload and operational costs out 5 years.

I suspect most rushing into the move have inaccurate mental models around true costs related to things like a 24/7/365 NOC and rolling their own IAM to solve SOC2 requirements.

Then there's the recruiting problem. Many engineers want to stay sharp on the latest and greatest in the cloud. Few will want to work on your klunky MVP built in house.

Article doesn't mention emerging trust and DLP issues with freely-available LLMs processing and aggregating deepest desires, and whole documents ostensibly sent for refinement, summary, or other natural transformations. If your employees are using it to make IP, best to keep a tight grip on it if you can. Sevenfold for regulated industries.

Of course, it's not like everyone crawled and indexed the web to keep things like that from search engines.