Fastmail @fastmail has been operating on bare metal for 25 years. Their planning and (over-)provisioning strategy reminds me of Wikimedia.

Situations where cloud renting is cost effective for medium or large companies are vanishingly rare, and always have been. As with so many big tech patterns, this is a myth held up by VC-backed startups and incentives.

https://www.fastmail.com/blog/why-we-use-our-own-hardware/

#Fastmail #baremetal #sustainability #CloudExit #CloudRepatriation #selfhosted #SelfHosting

Rob Hirschfeld and I had a fascinating conversation during #KubeCon about self-hosted and #baremetal infrastructure, which has become a hot topic amid predictions that enterprises will move #AIinference to self-hosted machines. But Rob, who's had a front-row seat to these conversations for more than a decade as CEO and co-founder of RackN told me that #AI is not yet the biggest factor in #cloudrepatriation. And there's a lot that enterprises don't know about the details of moving back to self-hosted infrastructure from #publiccloud and back to bare metal from #VMware.

Rob was kind enough to repeat himself during this interview for the #ITOps Query #vodcast, just published today. I think my audience will find the discussion as fascinating as I did.

https://youtu.be/uoDKcsUNwAk?si=jp26490G4JLpmPjP

Prediction: at least 90% of orgs doing "cloud repatriation" (aka "how hard can it be to run some infrastructure, ffs?") are going to get a nasty shock when they re-discover all the reasons that people moved to cloud in the first place: running infrastructure at even modest scale is absolutely not trivial.

Combine that with re-discovering all the basics of hand-offs, on-call, and other DevOps 101 stuff, it's going to a wild fscking ride 🏇

#CloudRepatriation #Cloud #DevOps #Infra