> There's not a company in the world that spends more than $1m annually on cloud costs that has saved money by doing so. You don't go to the cloud to save money, you go to the cloud to reduce technological risk.
I don't know why I have to explain this every time "data center vs cloud" discussions come up, but if you reduce risks, then you are in effect saving money.
There are other ways of reducing risks. You only save money if it's the most efficient way of reducing risks and your risks are purely convertible into cash.
I'm quite sure if you take managing your IT infrastructure as seriously as you take your core business, you can definitely save tons of money by handrolling your infrastructure.
There's also a big difference between doing so 10 years ago versus now, with all the enterprise grade open source solutions to infrastructure challenges.
> I'm quite sure if you take managing your IT infrastructure as seriously as you take your core business
Try telling a company like Catepillar who manufactures excavating tools to "take IT as seriously as you do making tools"?
> with all the enterprise grade open source solutions to infrastructure challenges
You mean like OpenStack? Have you ever been in a large IT org (non tech company...like a distributing/manufacturing company) that has tried to implement it? and then maintain it? Oof...
It seems you're trying to nail down an absolute, I'm just saying that there's options sometimes. In my opinion AirBnB is setting money on fire by running on AWS. They've got huge talent pools of great engineers they could activate to in house their infrastructure and they'd save hundreds of millions of dollars. At the same time there's companies that have no business running their own web applications let alone their own infrastructure. A company like caterpillar I think should be run almost entirely on no/low code platforms. Their research department might run some code, they might have teams doing embedded dev for their devices. Beyond that it should just all be SaaS. And between those two extremes there is like a whole spectrum a business could be on.
> In my opinion AirBnB is setting money on fire by running on AWS.
And I'm saying you're completely armchairing this analysis because you literally don't know any of these details.
> A company like caterpillar I think should be run almost entirely on no/low code platforms.
Are you suggesting a global manufacturer like Catepillar run it's global financial ledger on a no-code platform? Which implies building the code for it and then maintaining it?
> It seems you're trying to nail down an absolute
In fact, I'm not. The only absolute I'm trying to nail down is "you need to do a buy vs build, rent vs own assessment and make the decision there, neither one is unilaterally true without that assessment". Anyone trying to speculate about budgets in the $100M+ space is just heresay.
I don't know why I have to explain this every time "data center vs cloud" discussions come up, but if you reduce risks, then you are in effect saving money.