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Comment by fwungy | Hacker News Reader

IBM's Hybrid Cloud concept is promising.

Run your sensitive or expensive bulk resources like dbs onprem and go cloud for the rest. You can often save big just bringing your db onsite.

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In the AWS world, you can do this by colocating servers at an AWS Direct Connect facility. You get a fiber connection from your rack to AWS's rack inside the building, and then AWS backhauls it on their network to the AWS Region. There are such colocation facilities located within a few miles of any major AWS Region for low latency (~1 msec) connections.

The concept is promising, agreed. But like most (all?) recent IBM products, the failure point will be in the execution of the concept. IBM is a marketing company at this point, not a serious technology company.

Execution and rent-seeking – their culture is based on high margins so they tend to design things which will put a lot of hard to migrate logic into their app and even when they know they’re competing against more affordable options the prices will be eye-watering. I assume that the whales who do buy generate enough revenue to make up for the lost sales but it doesn’t seem like a good long-term strategy.

Works if latency isn't an issue between app and db, which it often times is.

I did a cloud migration from a local datacenter to GCP and DB latency was the big issue for us. Latency from our DC to GCP was ~10ms, so an average page load with 10 queries added 100ms overhead which was mostly unacceptable.

Big enterprisey applications like this would love to only be doing 10 queries, 30+ is much more likely, and I bet they won't be moving from 1 DC to 1 cloud region, so 10ms is also unlikely. Back of the envelope suggests more like 1s of additional latency.

That would barely work for a big enough OLAP deployment, with all sorts of varied consumers, let alone OLTP.

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