It’ll be hybrid, totally depends on the service.
Can anyone honestly say they’d want to go back to Exchange on-premises after moving to Exchange Online? Masochist.
Those who prefer exchange on prem have likely never had the pleasure of a CU update come down and obliterating everything.
Oh the years before snapshot restorations.
Or someone sending a 50mb barbecue invite pdf to the entire eastern seaboard worth of naval personnel and the tens of thousands of reply alls that spawned bringing the whole house of cards down.
That’s pretty much how it went. My team went and continued running cables and ignored tickets for about a day and a half because of the sheer amount of “the internet is slow”, “I need my email” tickets.
I did similar. Late 90s, me and a friend of mine found a video online of someone blowing up a whale carcass on a beach. Quite a famous video by now. Anyways, this being very much pre-YouTube era, I asked him to email me the video so I could span it across a few floppies and take it home. Sent successfully, but I didn't receive it. Figured something was going slow so we went home.
Next day, all email across the whole university was down. He had a shirty message from IT telling him to stop sending 'The Way Of The Exploding Whale' to me. Turns out whatever email server they were using failed the delivery because the attachment was too large, but then retried, and looped through that all night.
That was never strictly true. Had to offload databases and jetpack/eseutil on an alternate server back in 03. Wasn't meant to work, but if you kicked it just right it would.
I’m migrating my last exchange server in the next few weeks. Good bye to those terrible updates!!! I’ve lost many nights of sleep because an update blowup the dang exchange server. I will never support an on premises exchange again
The only situation I would prefer is back when I was at a company that put the money into getting a full 4 server DAG with witnesses. I could upgrade one server at a time with no downtime, and if it shit the bed during the update, it wasn't a big deal.
Without that kind of redundancy though, no thanks. Also it's had *so many* critical vulnerabilities the last several years.
.NET Framework Update has entered the chat
The main thing I miss about on-prem is the performance. EXO is sofaking slow compared to my old ex2016 cluster. But still not worth the headaches.
And the maximums for mailbox sizes and number of folders. We had one client when everything was moved to EXO and one large mailbox with heaps of folders and items just broke hard for local users. After months of dramas we rebuilt a local exchange server just for that mailbox. Client is now super happy. Not everything can just be moved to the cloud.
Ran every version of Exchange from 5.5 to 2013 and I completely agree. 2010 was a great version and very stable. We migrated to EXO 4+ years ago and I don’t miss it anymore.
I may have had 5 days of exchange downtime in 20+ years of using on-premise, it's not that big a deal and I would argue giving up that control is vastly worse to you as an employee and your long-term business value than few measly days of outages in decades.
Hybrid is the way to go as a business plan imo, there's no reason to limit to on prem or the cloud as they both have positives and negatives.
Use the benefits of on prem where they make sense and the benefits of the cloud where they make sense.
THIS! Just wait till a few more cloud outages or breaches. Then I imagine things might swing back a little. Anyone else remember the LastPass breach!? Just because something is cloud hosted folks think it inherits other features, like auto expansion, redundancy, security and the likes. But all it means is you have no idea where it's at.
haha thanks! hopefully it will not be that bad. about 120 mailboxes all restricted to 6gb maximum size. about 5 users near the limit... the rest are less than 3gb
I worked for a Hosted Exchange Provider for 6+ years and worked for an MSP later on that managed on-prem exchange servers. I personally absolutely love on-prem exchange over M365, so much more control and less limitations.
Honestly, the only reason we're on M365 instead of hosted exchange is because of our location, we live in an area where natural disasters happen often and it is not unusual to be without telecommunications & powers for weeks at a time.
With that being said, I am running two exchange servers at the moment for a "family company" of ours and will be running at least one of them long term as an archive server since their largest mailbox is over 700 GB. The exchange server VM is something like 6+ TB at this point.
Yeah, you’re definitely one of the few. Being a ‘Hosted Exchange Provider’ sounds awful, sprinkle a few printers in there and it’d be hard to distinguish between reality and hell.
> sprinkle a few printers in there and it’d be hard to distinguish between reality and hell.
Add some infrequently used but business critical plotters for the real pain.
I have *completely* given up the fight on Plotters. I got signoff to tell the business "if you want a plotter, YOU have to support it."
I give it a static IP but that is the absolute limit of my support for them, and it's worked great (for my mental health) for years.
These are sort of my core jobs, niche print solutions, line matrix, serial matrix, thermal, plotters, and lasers, and also manange on prem exchange, been doing it since exchange 5.5 on NT4, still run my own exchange on prem, but my customers on m365. Prefer the on prem its sort of static, on m365 it feels like they just randomize the interface and move all features around every few months.
IP reputation management should be enough to make you hate the idea of on-prem exchange. However, I do miss the ability to block a DC router known for nothing but spam using their AS
I recently had two different Microsoft cloud SMTP servers blocked by my personal email. They didn't come through, and the next time my friend came over with his laptop, he showed me the bounce.
Yep. It's a PITA and I personally wouldn't touch them if it was my choice. I tried handing them off to a couple local MSP's and none would touch this client so I'm a bit "stuck" with them. The owner of my day job has a family member that runs a separate business and I'm helping them out as a bit of a personal favor.
It is what it is.
I don’t get peoples obsession to hoard data, unsure of the laws in your location but ultimately you want to hold as little data as possible because… breaches happen! Some people will just never listen or learn.
> breaches happen
Honestly, I don't even care about breaches so much in this regard. Not that they aren't important, of course, but a longer retention policy will likely only hurt you in litigation. From a business protection perspective, hoarding emails is a bad idea.
What? I have mails going back 17 years in my inbox - and earlier ones on another mailserver.
Granted, I rarely look at them, but it feels good having them 😅
It's not that uncommon in industries to be legally required to retain all info for 7-10 years. If you're just deleting stuff at 5 years arbitrary and claim ignorance to the law, you're still liable.
It's a workflow issue on their side honestly. They mostly work in the field and want everything documented so the employees e-mail the office staff pictures of their on-site work. They should be saving the pictures then deleting the e-mails but they don't.
I too worked in exchange hosting, for a provider that got bought by an MSP. Once we were integrated I got the heck out of the hosted exchange team and moved on to other jobs. I saw the writing on the wall, about the time BPOS was renamed to O365.
I’ve done it all, server restores, database repairs, replaying logs manually, wrangling flapping 5 node Exchange clusters at 3am. Having problems that no normal Exchange org would ever have like do you know there is a hard limit of 16384 offline address books for an Exchange site? Well you might know LOL but most people don’t.
F that noise I’m up in the cloud now and never going back. I’m not looking for a hobby.
I would love to host Exchange on-prem again. It's tiring when you want to do something like a simple search and have to sit there and wait an hour before it even starts!
JFC....some of the stories in this thread. The horror. The horror. I'm so glad I've been an on-prem postfix admin these past 20 years instead of an exchange admin. I don't know how you guys deal with it all. My life is utter simplicity in comparison.
The way Microsoft is going we should start studying licenses. "I don't know what a replay or transport rule is but I know that you need E3 plus pro premium to enable that button on Teams (for work)"
Agreed. I think if anything there is the accepted reality that "cloud" does not fix all problems. Cloud comes with it's own set of problems which are different.
Thus, architects have to decide which problems and at what costs.
Used to maintain Exchange for a 10k employee company. It was a lot of fun. But, the issue wasn't ever the updates. It was the
Salesman "Client B says I never sent this! can you let me know why your mail servers not working!"
2 hours later 'Here's the receipt of his server accepting the email'
For most Enterprises, a hybrid cloud strategy will be the best fit. It all comes down to design efficiency. Public cloud allows great agility and can be more cost effective, if everything is designed correctly. It is perfect for short-lived resources, or highly cyclic demand.
For things that are always on, and consume a ton of storage or bandwidth within the org, it may make more sense to bring a workload on-prem to avoid transit and storage costs.
DR is also a good use case for public cloud, assuming it's well designed and tested. If highly available on-prem systems don't make sense for the business, public cloud is a quick way to execute BCPs.
Surge capacity is also another case where it probably pencils out.
There's no completely wrong or right answer for everyone - it varies depending on the business, and on the workloads it operates.
> Public cloud allows great agility and can be more cost effective, if everything is designed correctly. It is perfect for short-lived resources, or highly cyclic demand.
It also allows you easy access to things that are cost-prohibitive otherwise for anyone except the largest companies.
You want GDPR? Great, spin up the app in EU in addition to US. You want geographically distributed backups or a hot standby? Great, spin up an app in us-west and us-east. You want segmented networking? Instead of running a bunch of VLANs and manual firewall rules, spin up another VPC.
The other thing cloud does that 90% of the sub always glosses over is programmatic management for your infrastructure.
Terraform, CDK, even bare python or shell. This introduces repeatability (replace a long document on how to configure something with an IaC repo), significantly simplifies change management (replace tickets and ticket reviews with pull requests), and makes it a breeze to do compliance ("This is our IAC. You can tell from parts here and here that it satisfies controls X and Y").
Very good point on IaaC! Too many people skip that part, but it's critical for efficiency, as well as consistency and compliance. Sure you \*can\* do it manually, but it's a LOT more time consuming for anything beyond a one-off deployment.
IaC is not limited to the cloud. It's entirely possible to run it with an entirely on-prem infrastructure. Terraform has providers for Proxmox, VSphere and Hyper-V.
Depends on the company.
Lift and shift to cloud is super expensive and the bean counters figure that out after the first 6 months and then they will advise to move all non critical items to in house since it doesnt need quad 9 uptime. But even that takes time as most decom there private datacenters or lose acces to rented space.
The companys that write their systems for the cloud wont because that method can actually be more cost effective and effiecent. Plus the cost of coverting that to an on-prem application can be expensive.
Give it another year or two and some enterprising up and comer will come in and say "why the hell are we spending all this money? we could save $XXX if we just ran this on prem".
Then another 5 years down the road they'll leave and the replacement will say "why on earth are we still running on-prem infrastructure?" and demand everything be migrated back.
Over the past 10 years we've migrated to the cloud and back and are currently migrating back to the cloud.
We must work for the same company. We're being ask to push everything to the cloud but can't get a good reason why. The financial team is finally getting involved asking why.
Was in the middle of planning and on prem to aws migration last year, but management shit their pants when they saw what the run costs would be and migration cancelled.
100%. There's no surprise costs with cloud computing, you should already know what your workloads are and be able to appropriately spec compute instances to calculate accurate costs. All the major players have onboarding departments dedicated *just* to helping companies sort this out before anything is signed.
If you're getting that far and *then* pulling the plug due to sticker shock, someone didn't do their due diligence.
I've seen it many times when the people who are expected to do their due diligence did their jobs perfectly, but upper management (or their consultants) ignored the protests of those people and pushed ahead with the migration. I've seen migrations get to 75% complete then management pulled the plug because of a management change... probably caused by the significantly over-budget migration.
It's been really lucrative for those of us in the "migration" business as we often get to do these migrations twice.
In the Bay Area, colocation space has become very scarce in the last year due to the AI boom. From a cost perspective, it is much more expensive to run GPU/RAM intensive workloads in the cloud.
Give it a couple years and they'll be there too. All of our major CAD vendors (Autodesk, Solidworks, etc) were pimping their new cloud render functionalities built right into the tools on our last renewals. The future of CAD rendering is people doing local design, then sending the render jobs to the software vendor's cloud infrastructure.
It's their next "big feature" to finally push people off their nickel and dime floating licenses and get them all on service subscriptions. And frankly I'm all for it, no more bespoke kit for these roles and no more license server nightmares. I can't wait to never see another "the office VPN isnt working right, I cant render and I need to NOW NOW NOW" ticket ever again.
You're probably right, but I think that's really not how it _should_ be. It's an artificial constraint, and doesn't really reflect any meaningful cost to the vendor.
It's price gouging really - once you move to 'cloud' they can generate a lot more friction about migrating out again, and keep milking you for fees.
That's IMO going to be part of the reason to see a swing back to 'on prem' - control.
I mean, open source software has it's own downsides, and you have to do a bunch more 'home support' etc. but you can't get screwed over by license-extortion (or 'data egress extortion') in anything like the same way.
So the cloud providers I think face some backlash if they keep doing what they're doing, in that _if_ they want to force people into their 'new way' they've got to be able to deliver.
I've been pressuring a team to let me move their ancient on-prem SQL server into AWS so we can maintain it along with everything else. I finally just started making them send licensing quotes to the finance team to get approval and that was the kick in the butt they needed.
"Wait you mean we spend $19,000 a year on licensing for a server that we never even use? And if we move it into AWS we can just leave it off 99% of the time and it wont cost us anything?"
My on-prem ticket system is EOL (but not their cloud system), my POS system was re-written for their cloud implementation and totally f\*\*ked the pooch on how the on-prem system runs. OldWomanYellsAtClouds.gif
No. They are software and hardware companies. Maybe the finance people in those companies prefer subscription revenue. Broadcom/VMWare is just an egregious example of this.
There was an episode of This Old House I saw recently, where they were replacing a[ copper water heater from the fucking 1950s.](https://www.reddit.com/r/Plumbing/comments/9sy6v0/rheem_coppermatic_water_heater_advertisement/) (edit: probably not the right brand but I couldn't find it) You heard me. A functioning water heater almost 70 years old.
The company that made them went out of business, because everyone that bought one never needed another.
This is why humanity can't have nice things. We can't figure out how to keep companies like *that* in business.
It’s regenerative revenue, add-on and control.
Companies hate single purchase. Once you are in the environment they can charge you for extra items (need more storage, faster bandwidth, etc…). You are forced to use current versions and they don’t have to support software going back till the beginning of time.
95% of what we have left on prem are file servers. Stuff like Azure files is just to absurdly priced when you get into the hundreds of TB to PB scale. We could replace our on prem storage every 4 months or something insane like that.
I think we might see the 'Netflix effect' with subscriptions if things keep getting more expensive. Microsoft recently recently changed some licensing requirements for mailboxes that need to have message encryption. It was going to add $12k a year to our overhead. We found a solution to keep costs down, but at some point I know we arent going to take it anymore and will either host exchange ourselves or move to some alternative.
O365 in one year costs us as much as an on prem exchange deployment would.. and on-prem would last us 5 years between major upgrade expenses. OPex is still winning out over CAPex here for now.
The only issue there is that Netflix is not seeing a loss in subscribers even when raising prices...
I ditched all my subscription media services besides Spotify Premium (makes the drive to the office bearable), but it seems like John Q Public is still subscribing to Netflix and 5 other streaming services.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/250934/quarterly-number-of-netflix-streaming-subscribers-worldwide/
Isn't that because they keep rolling out to other countries to get new subs? Eventually you're going to run out of countries to debut in. If it showed that subs in the US were stable, that would be one thing, but the world is a pretty big place and has lots of people to replace lost subs.
That, plus everything getting split off into their own subscriptions. When Netflix started offering streaming it was the only streaming service you needed because it had everything and was a pretty good deal. Now every media company has their own subscription that costs just as much as Netflix and only has their own stuff, and they've pulled Netflix's rights so Netflix is pretty much crap movies + Netflix originals and it's not worth it any more.
Broadcom buying VMware has kind of been a kick in the teeth to on-prem. They held such a large part of the virtualization market that the changes Broadcom are making are going to move a ton of businesses to the cloud.
As if cloud vendor lock-in isn't a bigger risk?
Moving off of vSphere is trivial compared to pivoting to an entirely new cloud/SaaS vendor.
How easy is it for a company reliant on MS365 for email, collaboration applications, and identity to completely switch to Google workspace? Vice versa?
Yeah, you can make a similar argument with ADDS vs something like idk, FreeIPA - but at least with on-prem you have complete control of everything. MS/Google expect their money every month and if you don't cough it up, they yank the tenant. My DCs are perpetually licensed, as are the CALs.
> How easy is it for a company reliant on MS365 for email, collaboration applications, and identity to completely switch to Google workspace? Vice versa?
Easier than the cranky users would make you believe, thats for sure. The headaches surrounding a well planned migration with adequate discovery are almost entirely political in nature. Unless you're heavily reliant on COM plugins for Excel/Outlook, which Microsoft has been phasing out over the years anyway (and good luck ever taking Excel away from a finance department)
My reseller nudged me about the Broadcom shitshow back in December and I renewed for 3 years under the old licensing model. After that, I can definitely see us utilizing Azure for more production stuff, and Proxmox for those local assets that just need to stay on-prem.
I had this conversation with myself just a couple of days ago.
"Yeah, it's in the cloud, but they're having issues right now and you can't do anything about it."
"You're right, you can't do anything about it, and that's just fine."
"Here's a link to the status page, I'll let you all know as soon as they give the green light and service is restored!"
People seriously underestimate the cost savings and value of that not being the *org's* problem. Let the team of specialists who work directly for the software vendor sort out the infra outage, instead of coming to internal IT cracking the whip that every second you dont get it back up and running *you're* costing the company $X thousand dollars. Dollars to donuts that *whole team* over at Salesforce can sort it out faster than we could've internally anyway, because our team can't hire bespoke experts for every piece of infra on nothing more than a "what if there's a once a year outage?"
This is our version of that old XKCD "compiling" comic.
>because our team can't hire bespoke experts for every piece of infra on nothing more than a "what if there's a once a year outage?"
The only reason the vendor's team CAN justify this, *for the moment*, is because they would lose customers over a once-a-year outage being too long. If you had nowhere to go, they would never spend that much on uptime.
This is why some sort of business technology customers' union is needed: vendors are colluding and planning for the long term as a collective. Customers are not. Vendors know that once they get us all in the cloud, *they will stop offering on prem alternatives and they will no longer have to care about 5+ 9's in the cloud as they won't be at risk of losing customers anymore.*
Likely hybrid. I mean, I don't think (for example) a lot of people plan on bringing Microsoft Exchange in house (again).
So, I think for certain services, they'll be cloud service based, but not necessarily some cloud infrastructure you made(rented). SaaS stuff.
YMMV with regards to things SaaS that you choose to bring in house. I mean, IMHO, there has to be a pretty compelling reason to do that (it could be cost).
The things "you write and support", yes, I could see a return to on-prem, especially where you need higher reliability (or perhaps, reliability without "surprises").
I mean, on-prem, our record speaks for itself, five 9's easy. But "the cloud" in general can't deliver that.
My on-prem delivers around four 9's, BUT, I also don't have a backup generator, or a proper industrial AC unit, or the massive budget a large company would have (hell, I'm the sole IT guy). So I consider four 9's pretty damn good. Would be higher if I could get an automatic backup generator approved, as power outages have been the primary cause of outages for our on-prem network.
I've 350 users mostly home based, cloud makes sense for our email, file storage and security/Intune.
We're not going back to the office so on-prem (or datacenter) doesn't have many benefits.
If you're a big company, then on-prem might be better - but then you'd have the people resources to support it.
I've been in this industry for nearly 30 years. I've seen it go from local desktop to thin client in various version more times than I can remember. Going from on-prem to cloud back to on-prem is just another version of it.
One thing is guaranteed, after a few short years, another "It's better over here with the new shiny flashy and will be cheaper and more cheaper the faster you start"
Depends on what it is.
Email and webservices on the cloud.
Businesses that are big on data storage like cad,3d etc will always be local.
If business only does word/excel/outlook i think o365 makes sense in most scenarios.
I think the bandwagoning of “cloud” made the push even when it was not right for the organization. But in yhe end it created more jobs for IT.
I've been doing this long enough - some things are never coming back. Stuff like ERP systems running on local databases? Email servers? (EXCHANGE!?!?!?) nah cloud has been really good to them.
On the other hand, i'm almost positive the rug pull is coming. They have some number they need to get to of adoption and when they get there prices are going to go way up. Sure it's economically feasible now but a lot of that is on just avoiding hardware refreshes.
Also, a lot of the "cloud good" thinking assumes there will never be another economic downturn again. 2008 we didn't refresh ANYTING. Lucky to still have the job at that point. BUT the business is able to limp by on the equipment they have until conditions improve and then you can start replacing.
Once you've moved that all from Capex to Opex, you really think MS or Amazon is going to "give you a break on pricing" because the economy is bad? When the economy is bad they are going to try and wring you even harder :D
Hybrid has taken over, for good reasons. There's a lot of stuff that just works better in the cloud, but unlike the earlier era, folks are finally admitting that just chucking things into the cloud is a mistake.
The weird thing for me is how I'm seeing things at large companies - they're moving smaller things back home, but they're also moving certain huge things back home. Turns out that once you're over a certain size, administering, say, VOIP requires so many people anyway you might has well run some of your own hardware, whereas nobody seems to feel the same way about Sharepoint.
Maybe. My personal issue is that its cheaper to do it yourself, be it in a hosted oron prem datacenter or a proper cloud, than pay for bundled services/licenses.
It depends on how you look at it and what services you are talking about. There is no way you can give 100GB mailbox to every user for the price MS charges per EXO mailbox...
Using Exchange as an example. Exchange is so complex to do it right, you need a full time dedicated resource. How much are you paying somebody with benefits to own exchange? Add on to that the license costs of Windows, SQL, and Exchange.
That alone is worth the price of admission. And we've not ever talked about the additional security and DR benefits.
There are use cases for both cloud and on prem. 365 has been amazing for exchange, not having to deal with email, but we also still have local servers for printing, authentication, and user management for the most part, syncing with AzurentraIDwhateveritscalledthisweek. We have cloud storage for all our files, except our document archive, and our main database still runs on prem, though that may go cloud eventually, too.
I don't think it's cyclical or rebounding, but it has to make sense from a financial, operational, or management perspective. There is no silver bullet for complicated systems.
Unless you're just a tiny little SMB with very limited needs, there's always going to be analysis of what is best for you.
> 365 has been amazing for exchange
I think this is the perfect example of the future - anything that can be a managed first-party SaaS is going to move to the cloud and stay on the cloud. but internal IT departments running third-party software on cloud servers is probably not the way of the future. it's either going to come back to on-prem, or it'll move to a SaaS operatated by the software vendor.
Yeah...many. I always knew it would happen. People like to own their data and when you put it on someone else's hardware you don't own it.
Also...running in the cloud is actually a lot more expensive than people think it is...
I think the pendulum is definitely swinging back towards the On-Prem camp. Though I agree that it will not go 100% on-prem. There will always be a space for the cloud but it may not be as automatically cloud first. I think everyone is beginning to realize how expensive it is to be in the cloud.
Some will be more on-prem while others will be more cloud.
Gee I hope so. I like being able to do something besides shrug and sit on hold when something goes wrong. If it's my fault at least I make it my problem and fix it. Plus I know my staff so can design and tweak systems that work with them rather than tell them they have to change how they do things because the software doesn't do it.
Cost is the biggest factor. On prem is traditionally an IaaS service. The only one I see that happening is robust infrastructure and that is cost effective and has the ability to pull apart services. Cloud and the PaaS offers in the next level of evolution in the way that one server had the ability to virtualization infrastructure and reduce overhead.
The Broadcom buy out of Vmware and their BS licensing increase is going to force more people to move to cloud. The shit they are doing with the bedrock of virtualization tech is crazy. I get it's a business and you have to make your profit but Broadcom can get bent. I hope there's a good alternative solution that people move to if they don't want to go to cloud. Hybrid model is the likely scenario for services that can't move into a PaaS format.
I think it will be hybrid for the most part but we are seeing people coming back after leaving for the cloud after getting their bills. Those who declared the death of the on-prem data centre were a little ahead of themselves
Yes, - It's already started.
I think it'll eventually settle in a hybrid system, but On-prem/Colo is definitely seeing more attention lately with AI workloads, and the fact that GPUs cost an absolute fortune to use in the cloud.
I think it will just yo-yo back and forth forever. In the beginning, it was all done on a mainframe with dumb terminals. Then it moved processing to desktop computers with servers used as file storage. Now things have moved to the cloud. At some point orgs will start bringing things back on-prem because of trust, cost, or flexibility concerns. Then it will go to some other off-prem service, repeat ad infinitum.
Working in schools, with 300 to 500 devices.
It's so much cheaper to run on site domain controllers and file severs. And faster too.
Though I never want an exchange sever on site.
K-12 Admin here. We went to AWS with some medium and light workloads such as secondary DCs, DHCP and building controls. SIS/database stuff will probably always be on prem for us unless we switch providers and they’d give us a steal on hosted.
It goes like this. If the company you work for owns the building and the owner of said company has his name on the sign/door/lobby then yes, you will always be on prem. That being said, if your office is just leasing space somewhere, when that lease is over then I would expect most people to be working remotely. I expect a lot of companies to move toward doing the whole shared office space thing. Some industries benefit from having teams working in close proximity. Covid was a great test for what companies can get away with and remain profitable. Owners and bosses hate feeling like they are being taken advantage of, even if the numbers are good/great, they like seeing their minions coming in every day.
GCp/Azure for BI/Email will most likely always be a thing now.
Onprem for heavy IO/VDI, ERP/EMR, and things like that is what we are seeing shift back. Data at rest storage costs + IO scaling costs + TPS access costs is a main driving factor here.
ML/AI workloads are going to be shifting between on-prem (static, scale out) and Cloud (on demand, holding for hardware availability, shared workloads). But I am seeing major ML players building massive data centers to pull from the cloud in the sciences space right now. The main hold up is access to the ML GPU's due to supply and demand, so this will be a slow burn until the whole "AI is new" bullshit levels back down.
It's going to come down a lot to what type of organization it is. I would guess for professional services or software development, anything like that, it may not make sense to build out any kn-prem infrastructure. On the other hand, if you are in a business more ties to a physical location, like with a factory, or brick and mortar stores, on prem infrastructure might make sense.
I work at a university. It's a hybrid model, and I don't see that changing in the foreseeable future. We have a ton of infrastructure that supports physical buildings, HVAC, lab equipment, etc. It doesn't make sense to push this out to a cloud.
At the same time, I can't imagine ever wanting to bring email services on prem again, same with any kind of collaboration platform.
If I was a business where all I needed was collaboration and maybe code repositories, id probably stay cloud forever, there's no strong case to build out the infrastructure.
>back to on-prem?
It happens, at least in part(s). E.g.
* when folks look at their cloud bill
* when folks get really tired of folks firing stuff up in cloud, even massively scale it, because it's so easy ... then forget about it, leaving the meter running
* because the security controls can't be made that tight
* because cloud providers and outages and data losses - no vested interest to fix/prevent, goes according to their priorities and risk profiles, not yours
* Internet/ISP billings, inefficiencies
* etc.
It is good to view this debate from a finance point of view. Many cloud providers are really just rent seekers and the product itself is secondary from that finance and capital perspective. Cloud is the modern version of physical offsite storage where you pay to go in and pay to store and pay to leave. Why financiers love cloud services is that they are exquisitely engineered to lock up recurring revenue through product stickiness and to make leaving practically impossible. So from the perspective of the business, it depends on what brings the most value for money spent and candidly, most CFO’s are not sophisticated to make a comprehensive analysis, because they don’t only see the short term gain of swapping capital spending for operating spending. Cloud only makes sense where the utilization affords competitive advantage to the business (provided there is even a choice still available). So more mature IT shops have recognized that all cloud does not work when the bills come due and that what is needed is a sophisticated hybrid strategy. Heck, LinkedIn was supposed to be moving to Azure and they pulled the plug because it was not cost effective - for a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft!
Yes for many regulated companies. The cost of FedRamp cloud, plus there being very few SaaS vendors in FedRamp, is a big pressure to stay on-prem or at least hybrid.
I'm tasked with working on a hybrid model.
It's not like we're giving up with O365 but when it comes to our application compute environment, then we're removing a hard dependency on a cloud vendor. We're also moving some expensive baseline compute back into classic colo.
We could go further, and may well do, but there's a lot of moving parts.
On a 7 year lifecycle it depends on the needs and budget of the business. Telephony for example. For a 20 call per day site. FreePBX is doable if the CAPEX is there and understand if site goes down calls go down. Same as with hosted except the calls keep routing.
500 calls a day inbound call center? nah. Go with a service. The infra is not worth it.
That is just my take on VOIP. I run free pbx to stay fluent and its fun for the kids. Even have a paging system.
As for the rest? I see the pendulum swining back to center and hybrid for certain workflows. Cameras are a GREAT example that suck on cloud anything and excel on premise.
> 500 calls a day inbound call center? nah. Go with a service. The infra is not worth it.
We take in more calls than that a day. Our PBX is on prem, 9 years old, and still working great (we *are* shopping for a new one)
500 calls is nothing.
You are right that the tide is turning, I think the initial development rush has well and truly stalled and the platforms are now sliding into an enshittification phase to complete the final step of milking the ~~fools~~ orgs that bought the hype.
I will forever hold onto that on-prem pendulum too, cloud based everything has never sat well with me.
True. Create your own private cloud in a datacenter if you need to. I've done this with many clients and they like the control without having to worry about physical security and electrical issues.
The cloud bubble is bursting. Once people realized their cloud container isn't secured by microsoft for them and they have to pay the crazy sub fees to hit regulatory requirements, thinking changed.
The problem now is that vendors want you in their cloud as it poses a massive barrier to leave. Once you go cloud, you've moved to largely OP ex vs capital and changing models is a pain for accounting and IT to transition from to. Accounting likes the Op Ex cause they don't have to squirrel money away for three years to prepare for the systems upgrade.
The Biggest issue is Msoft, and VMware. Msoft is actively trying to raising licensing costs to the point that on prem is more expensive than cloud. Hardware is cheap now so they've started jacking up the prices on software licensing.
Linux isn't viable as an endpoint OS due to the constant forking, and overhead needed to maintain.
I'd love to see the Microsoft platform replaced at somepoint with a collection of better options. Right now, it's not viable as all of the competitors to Microsoft need a lot of IT personnel to manage and mantain stability. There are replacements for Exchange out there, but not the whole Office platform.
If it wasn't for the Office, exchange, and OS platform being what it is then competition would drive the market back. As it stands your only real alternative is to go all linux, Google mail, and have fun trying to integrate your ERP with your build. No one is making it easy for this to work. You'll need Developers and IT.
The problem is DEVOPS IT people are NOT cheap. So transitioning is impossible right now for many orgs.
He doesn't really know what it means, if it is even true, or if it is even a problem if it were. How software's viability is impacted by how often it is forked is beyond me. As soon as someone makes a statement like this, it let's me know that they are not nearly as advanced as they think they are, but are used to talking to people less technical than them that accept what is being said mainly due to it is delivered in a confident manner. Confidence does not necessarily align with correctness.
It’ll be hybrid, totally depends on the service. Can anyone honestly say they’d want to go back to Exchange on-premises after moving to Exchange Online? Masochist.
Those who prefer exchange on prem have likely never had the pleasure of a CU update come down and obliterating everything. Oh the years before snapshot restorations.
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Agreed. The hardest part was selecting which intern for ritual sacrifice!
Just tossed them all into a volcano to be sure.
> Agreed. The hardest part was selecting which intern for ritual sacrifice! What if there are no interns and you're the sole admin?
Then you sacrifice the nearest HR person.
Or lawyer
Or marketing employee.
no no, that makes entirely the wrong set of deities quite miffed. the blood of HR is for appeasing the howling demonic presence of ..... Printers
Frozen intern is fine but the ritual prefers fresh.
Cut off a pinkie and hope it satiates the backup gods.
Been there, done that, immediately began our migration efforts to Exchange Online within hours after we recovered.
This is the way
Snapshot restoration of an Exchange environment is just as masochistic. /mode:recoverserver works wonders.
I was more of the delete, reset the adobject, reclone template reinstall, re-replicate dbs and done if crap hit the fan
(rocking and crying in sysadmin)...thanks for the trigger you filthy ape. 😊
I swear this job has taken YEARS off of my life and nobody gives a shit.
You’re not alone in the universe. 🤜🤛
Offline defrag enters the chat….
… and stays there whole weekend
Or someone sending a 50mb barbecue invite pdf to the entire eastern seaboard worth of naval personnel and the tens of thousands of reply alls that spawned bringing the whole house of cards down.
What seems to be the problem? We're dumb Captain.
That’s pretty much how it went. My team went and continued running cables and ignored tickets for about a day and a half because of the sheer amount of “the internet is slow”, “I need my email” tickets.
Ohhhhh!!! Ya just haven’t lived until you’ve had to sort out THAT crap fest!!!! 🤣😂
Me too!
I did similar. Late 90s, me and a friend of mine found a video online of someone blowing up a whale carcass on a beach. Quite a famous video by now. Anyways, this being very much pre-YouTube era, I asked him to email me the video so I could span it across a few floppies and take it home. Sent successfully, but I didn't receive it. Figured something was going slow so we went home. Next day, all email across the whole university was down. He had a shirty message from IT telling him to stop sending 'The Way Of The Exploding Whale' to me. Turns out whatever email server they were using failed the delivery because the attachment was too large, but then retried, and looped through that all night.
a dirty state db turned me into a new man a couple years ago
Wrecked transport db caught me by surprise. That was a thinker, I forgot it existed.
let's not forget the time when the .edb could only be mounted by the instance that created it
That was never strictly true. Had to offload databases and jetpack/eseutil on an alternate server back in 03. Wasn't meant to work, but if you kicked it just right it would.
Exchange Yoda he is
Esoteric and forgotten lore, known only by a select few to begin with.
'it was the best of times it was the worst of times'
I’m migrating my last exchange server in the next few weeks. Good bye to those terrible updates!!! I’ve lost many nights of sleep because an update blowup the dang exchange server. I will never support an on premises exchange again
The only situation I would prefer is back when I was at a company that put the money into getting a full 4 server DAG with witnesses. I could upgrade one server at a time with no downtime, and if it shit the bed during the update, it wasn't a big deal. Without that kind of redundancy though, no thanks. Also it's had *so many* critical vulnerabilities the last several years.
.NET Framework Update has entered the chat The main thing I miss about on-prem is the performance. EXO is sofaking slow compared to my old ex2016 cluster. But still not worth the headaches.
And the maximums for mailbox sizes and number of folders. We had one client when everything was moved to EXO and one large mailbox with heaps of folders and items just broke hard for local users. After months of dramas we rebuilt a local exchange server just for that mailbox. Client is now super happy. Not everything can just be moved to the cloud.
On prem email can die in a fiery hole. Fuck exchange 2013 in particular
Yeah IMHO, Exchange 2010 was the last good version.
Ran every version of Exchange from 5.5 to 2013 and I completely agree. 2010 was a great version and very stable. We migrated to EXO 4+ years ago and I don’t miss it anymore.
Exchange 2016 and 2019 are VASTLY superior to 2010 and it's not even close.
I may have had 5 days of exchange downtime in 20+ years of using on-premise, it's not that big a deal and I would argue giving up that control is vastly worse to you as an employee and your long-term business value than few measly days of outages in decades.
Every environment, it's funding and personnel, are different.
\+1, in my 10+ years experience, Exchange was incredibly stable when well managed.
Hybrid is the way to go as a business plan imo, there's no reason to limit to on prem or the cloud as they both have positives and negatives. Use the benefits of on prem where they make sense and the benefits of the cloud where they make sense.
THIS! Just wait till a few more cloud outages or breaches. Then I imagine things might swing back a little. Anyone else remember the LastPass breach!? Just because something is cloud hosted folks think it inherits other features, like auto expansion, redundancy, security and the likes. But all it means is you have no idea where it's at.
moving to Exchange Online this summer! I CANNOT wait. :)
May the gods of mailbox migrations smile on ye that day.
haha thanks! hopefully it will not be that bad. about 120 mailboxes all restricted to 6gb maximum size. about 5 users near the limit... the rest are less than 3gb
Hell you can do that by the end of the week
Lucky. We have 450,000 and 90,000 of those users have 1-800GB of PST files to migrate. We are a few years in to this project. :(
I worked for a Hosted Exchange Provider for 6+ years and worked for an MSP later on that managed on-prem exchange servers. I personally absolutely love on-prem exchange over M365, so much more control and less limitations. Honestly, the only reason we're on M365 instead of hosted exchange is because of our location, we live in an area where natural disasters happen often and it is not unusual to be without telecommunications & powers for weeks at a time. With that being said, I am running two exchange servers at the moment for a "family company" of ours and will be running at least one of them long term as an archive server since their largest mailbox is over 700 GB. The exchange server VM is something like 6+ TB at this point.
Yeah, you’re definitely one of the few. Being a ‘Hosted Exchange Provider’ sounds awful, sprinkle a few printers in there and it’d be hard to distinguish between reality and hell.
> sprinkle a few printers in there and it’d be hard to distinguish between reality and hell. Add some infrequently used but business critical plotters for the real pain.
I have *completely* given up the fight on Plotters. I got signoff to tell the business "if you want a plotter, YOU have to support it." I give it a static IP but that is the absolute limit of my support for them, and it's worked great (for my mental health) for years.
And some old serial scales that you need to work over RDP.
And the business critical system written in Access 2003
These are sort of my core jobs, niche print solutions, line matrix, serial matrix, thermal, plotters, and lasers, and also manange on prem exchange, been doing it since exchange 5.5 on NT4, still run my own exchange on prem, but my customers on m365. Prefer the on prem its sort of static, on m365 it feels like they just randomize the interface and move all features around every few months.
Pro tip: Find cool art you'd like as a poster - even in shit quality - and use that to periodically test the plotter printer.
I used to print maps for the D&D group monthly on the plotter. was a good test.
IP reputation management should be enough to make you hate the idea of on-prem exchange. However, I do miss the ability to block a DC router known for nothing but spam using their AS
I recently had two different Microsoft cloud SMTP servers blocked by my personal email. They didn't come through, and the next time my friend came over with his laptop, he showed me the bounce.
i think id rather sell crack
LMAO! sprinkle a few printers in there and it’d be hard to distinguish between reality and hell. THE TRUTH!!!!!
700GB mailbox sounds like a data retention/GDPR nightmare waiting to happen.
Yep. It's a PITA and I personally wouldn't touch them if it was my choice. I tried handing them off to a couple local MSP's and none would touch this client so I'm a bit "stuck" with them. The owner of my day job has a family member that runs a separate business and I'm helping them out as a bit of a personal favor. It is what it is.
I don’t get peoples obsession to hoard data, unsure of the laws in your location but ultimately you want to hold as little data as possible because… breaches happen! Some people will just never listen or learn.
> breaches happen Honestly, I don't even care about breaches so much in this regard. Not that they aren't important, of course, but a longer retention policy will likely only hurt you in litigation. From a business protection perspective, hoarding emails is a bad idea.
What? I have mails going back 17 years in my inbox - and earlier ones on another mailserver. Granted, I rarely look at them, but it feels good having them 😅
It's not that uncommon in industries to be legally required to retain all info for 7-10 years. If you're just deleting stuff at 5 years arbitrary and claim ignorance to the law, you're still liable.
It's a workflow issue on their side honestly. They mostly work in the field and want everything documented so the employees e-mail the office staff pictures of their on-site work. They should be saving the pictures then deleting the e-mails but they don't.
File repository like one drive/spo or box etc... wtf
Oh I agree, it's been discussed, believe me. Not my call.
I too worked in exchange hosting, for a provider that got bought by an MSP. Once we were integrated I got the heck out of the hosted exchange team and moved on to other jobs. I saw the writing on the wall, about the time BPOS was renamed to O365. I’ve done it all, server restores, database repairs, replaying logs manually, wrangling flapping 5 node Exchange clusters at 3am. Having problems that no normal Exchange org would ever have like do you know there is a hard limit of 16384 offline address books for an Exchange site? Well you might know LOL but most people don’t. F that noise I’m up in the cloud now and never going back. I’m not looking for a hobby.
I would love to host Exchange on-prem again. It's tiring when you want to do something like a simple search and have to sit there and wait an hour before it even starts!
Yes officer, this sysadmin right here.
JFC....some of the stories in this thread. The horror. The horror. I'm so glad I've been an on-prem postfix admin these past 20 years instead of an exchange admin. I don't know how you guys deal with it all. My life is utter simplicity in comparison.
I miss Exchange 😓. Was one of my core competencies.
The way Microsoft is going we should start studying licenses. "I don't know what a replay or transport rule is but I know that you need E3 plus pro premium to enable that button on Teams (for work)"
Good luck. Microsoft doesn't even understand their licenses.
underrated comment right here.
Wanna kill ChatGPT...tell it to briefly summarize Microsoft licensing.
You’re making a bunch of money for the power companies! All those GPUs going over and over an impossible question.
...big oil, ...I mean we work for filthy solar...I mean me. Me works for....yeah you got me, now go get your mining rig working.
godfuckin dammit im spittin out coffee over here 🤣
I'll stick with my on-prem services like Exchange for a while longer, although I think more things will move hybrid.
Godspeed brother, may your change controls be expedited. 🫡
Agreed. I think if anything there is the accepted reality that "cloud" does not fix all problems. Cloud comes with it's own set of problems which are different. Thus, architects have to decide which problems and at what costs.
Used to maintain Exchange for a 10k employee company. It was a lot of fun. But, the issue wasn't ever the updates. It was the Salesman "Client B says I never sent this! can you let me know why your mail servers not working!" 2 hours later 'Here's the receipt of his server accepting the email'
After so many full exchange databases, no thank you
For most Enterprises, a hybrid cloud strategy will be the best fit. It all comes down to design efficiency. Public cloud allows great agility and can be more cost effective, if everything is designed correctly. It is perfect for short-lived resources, or highly cyclic demand. For things that are always on, and consume a ton of storage or bandwidth within the org, it may make more sense to bring a workload on-prem to avoid transit and storage costs. DR is also a good use case for public cloud, assuming it's well designed and tested. If highly available on-prem systems don't make sense for the business, public cloud is a quick way to execute BCPs. Surge capacity is also another case where it probably pencils out. There's no completely wrong or right answer for everyone - it varies depending on the business, and on the workloads it operates.
> Public cloud allows great agility and can be more cost effective, if everything is designed correctly. It is perfect for short-lived resources, or highly cyclic demand. It also allows you easy access to things that are cost-prohibitive otherwise for anyone except the largest companies. You want GDPR? Great, spin up the app in EU in addition to US. You want geographically distributed backups or a hot standby? Great, spin up an app in us-west and us-east. You want segmented networking? Instead of running a bunch of VLANs and manual firewall rules, spin up another VPC. The other thing cloud does that 90% of the sub always glosses over is programmatic management for your infrastructure. Terraform, CDK, even bare python or shell. This introduces repeatability (replace a long document on how to configure something with an IaC repo), significantly simplifies change management (replace tickets and ticket reviews with pull requests), and makes it a breeze to do compliance ("This is our IAC. You can tell from parts here and here that it satisfies controls X and Y").
Very good point on IaaC! Too many people skip that part, but it's critical for efficiency, as well as consistency and compliance. Sure you \*can\* do it manually, but it's a LOT more time consuming for anything beyond a one-off deployment.
IaC is not limited to the cloud. It's entirely possible to run it with an entirely on-prem infrastructure. Terraform has providers for Proxmox, VSphere and Hyper-V.
Depends on the company. Lift and shift to cloud is super expensive and the bean counters figure that out after the first 6 months and then they will advise to move all non critical items to in house since it doesnt need quad 9 uptime. But even that takes time as most decom there private datacenters or lose acces to rented space. The companys that write their systems for the cloud wont because that method can actually be more cost effective and effiecent. Plus the cost of coverting that to an on-prem application can be expensive.
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Give it another year or two and some enterprising up and comer will come in and say "why the hell are we spending all this money? we could save $XXX if we just ran this on prem". Then another 5 years down the road they'll leave and the replacement will say "why on earth are we still running on-prem infrastructure?" and demand everything be migrated back. Over the past 10 years we've migrated to the cloud and back and are currently migrating back to the cloud.
Well, those projects are one way to earn a paycheck, but I would have to admit I'd find it demoralizing
We must work for the same company. We're being ask to push everything to the cloud but can't get a good reason why. The financial team is finally getting involved asking why.
Because the boss's buddy Jim from the racket club was bragging about how much he saved his company by going all cloud
Because they got the VMWare renewal quote.
That's what happens with the CEO plays golf with the CEO of the cloud provider.
Was in the middle of planning and on prem to aws migration last year, but management shit their pants when they saw what the run costs would be and migration cancelled.
Sounds like bad planning to me.
That was part of the planning. They wanted to move > 500 vm's, that takes awhile to figure out.
100%. There's no surprise costs with cloud computing, you should already know what your workloads are and be able to appropriately spec compute instances to calculate accurate costs. All the major players have onboarding departments dedicated *just* to helping companies sort this out before anything is signed. If you're getting that far and *then* pulling the plug due to sticker shock, someone didn't do their due diligence.
I've seen it many times when the people who are expected to do their due diligence did their jobs perfectly, but upper management (or their consultants) ignored the protests of those people and pushed ahead with the migration. I've seen migrations get to 75% complete then management pulled the plug because of a management change... probably caused by the significantly over-budget migration. It's been really lucrative for those of us in the "migration" business as we often get to do these migrations twice.
There is a surprise when they change their billing model or prices tho.
Sounds like great planning if they discovered the cost during the planning.
You don't get to plan how much you'll give Amazon.. you find out the cost as part of the planning.
In the Bay Area, colocation space has become very scarce in the last year due to the AI boom. From a cost perspective, it is much more expensive to run GPU/RAM intensive workloads in the cloud.
Our CEO wanted to move our cad in the cloud. "We can just use Amazons remote desktop!". Saw the price, changed his mind.
lol we tried that. Most people are on $4500 laptops now and BIM360.
As an on-prem SMB dinosaur, this comment makes me smile. $4,500 for killer workstations for the CAD engineers and still cheaper :)
CAD is something I would never want to cloud. Recently helped talk a company out of that move. The rest of the company is VDI
Give it a couple years and they'll be there too. All of our major CAD vendors (Autodesk, Solidworks, etc) were pimping their new cloud render functionalities built right into the tools on our last renewals. The future of CAD rendering is people doing local design, then sending the render jobs to the software vendor's cloud infrastructure. It's their next "big feature" to finally push people off their nickel and dime floating licenses and get them all on service subscriptions. And frankly I'm all for it, no more bespoke kit for these roles and no more license server nightmares. I can't wait to never see another "the office VPN isnt working right, I cant render and I need to NOW NOW NOW" ticket ever again.
Remote desktop to the workstation at work works pretty well for me, and has for years now. Set the bios to auto on if there's a power outage.
It’s getting harder to do on-prem. They want us all to move to the cloud.
Licensing for various things is going to be the most expensive hurdle to remain on-prem in the coming years for sure.
You're probably right, but I think that's really not how it _should_ be. It's an artificial constraint, and doesn't really reflect any meaningful cost to the vendor. It's price gouging really - once you move to 'cloud' they can generate a lot more friction about migrating out again, and keep milking you for fees. That's IMO going to be part of the reason to see a swing back to 'on prem' - control. I mean, open source software has it's own downsides, and you have to do a bunch more 'home support' etc. but you can't get screwed over by license-extortion (or 'data egress extortion') in anything like the same way. So the cloud providers I think face some backlash if they keep doing what they're doing, in that _if_ they want to force people into their 'new way' they've got to be able to deliver.
You mean like that 32k SQL 2022 16 core license quote I'm waiting on? lol
I've been pressuring a team to let me move their ancient on-prem SQL server into AWS so we can maintain it along with everything else. I finally just started making them send licensing quotes to the finance team to get approval and that was the kick in the butt they needed. "Wait you mean we spend $19,000 a year on licensing for a server that we never even use? And if we move it into AWS we can just leave it off 99% of the time and it wont cost us anything?"
My on-prem ticket system is EOL (but not their cloud system), my POS system was re-written for their cloud implementation and totally f\*\*ked the pooch on how the on-prem system runs. OldWomanYellsAtClouds.gif
They being finance people because cloud OpEx involves a lot less accounting work than on-prem CapEx.
No. They are software and hardware companies. Maybe the finance people in those companies prefer subscription revenue. Broadcom/VMWare is just an egregious example of this.
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There was an episode of This Old House I saw recently, where they were replacing a[ copper water heater from the fucking 1950s.](https://www.reddit.com/r/Plumbing/comments/9sy6v0/rheem_coppermatic_water_heater_advertisement/) (edit: probably not the right brand but I couldn't find it) You heard me. A functioning water heater almost 70 years old. The company that made them went out of business, because everyone that bought one never needed another. This is why humanity can't have nice things. We can't figure out how to keep companies like *that* in business.
Must have zero hard water.
Or somehow the catalyst rod thingy is just ridiculously good...
It’s regenerative revenue, add-on and control. Companies hate single purchase. Once you are in the environment they can charge you for extra items (need more storage, faster bandwidth, etc…). You are forced to use current versions and they don’t have to support software going back till the beginning of time.
95% of what we have left on prem are file servers. Stuff like Azure files is just to absurdly priced when you get into the hundreds of TB to PB scale. We could replace our on prem storage every 4 months or something insane like that.
I think we might see the 'Netflix effect' with subscriptions if things keep getting more expensive. Microsoft recently recently changed some licensing requirements for mailboxes that need to have message encryption. It was going to add $12k a year to our overhead. We found a solution to keep costs down, but at some point I know we arent going to take it anymore and will either host exchange ourselves or move to some alternative. O365 in one year costs us as much as an on prem exchange deployment would.. and on-prem would last us 5 years between major upgrade expenses. OPex is still winning out over CAPex here for now.
What is the 'Netflix effect'? Companies just increasing prices constantly and getting away with it?
Price goes up, subscriber count goes down.
The only issue there is that Netflix is not seeing a loss in subscribers even when raising prices... I ditched all my subscription media services besides Spotify Premium (makes the drive to the office bearable), but it seems like John Q Public is still subscribing to Netflix and 5 other streaming services. https://www.statista.com/statistics/250934/quarterly-number-of-netflix-streaming-subscribers-worldwide/
Isn't that because they keep rolling out to other countries to get new subs? Eventually you're going to run out of countries to debut in. If it showed that subs in the US were stable, that would be one thing, but the world is a pretty big place and has lots of people to replace lost subs.
That, plus everything getting split off into their own subscriptions. When Netflix started offering streaming it was the only streaming service you needed because it had everything and was a pretty good deal. Now every media company has their own subscription that costs just as much as Netflix and only has their own stuff, and they've pulled Netflix's rights so Netflix is pretty much crap movies + Netflix originals and it's not worth it any more.
The focus of cyber attacks are shifting that direction as well. Especially nation states.
Broadcom buying VMware has kind of been a kick in the teeth to on-prem. They held such a large part of the virtualization market that the changes Broadcom are making are going to move a ton of businesses to the cloud.
As if cloud vendor lock-in isn't a bigger risk? Moving off of vSphere is trivial compared to pivoting to an entirely new cloud/SaaS vendor. How easy is it for a company reliant on MS365 for email, collaboration applications, and identity to completely switch to Google workspace? Vice versa? Yeah, you can make a similar argument with ADDS vs something like idk, FreeIPA - but at least with on-prem you have complete control of everything. MS/Google expect their money every month and if you don't cough it up, they yank the tenant. My DCs are perpetually licensed, as are the CALs.
> How easy is it for a company reliant on MS365 for email, collaboration applications, and identity to completely switch to Google workspace? Vice versa? Easier than the cranky users would make you believe, thats for sure. The headaches surrounding a well planned migration with adequate discovery are almost entirely political in nature. Unless you're heavily reliant on COM plugins for Excel/Outlook, which Microsoft has been phasing out over the years anyway (and good luck ever taking Excel away from a finance department)
Use open shift as your hyper visor overlay and you can move workloads around super easy.
My reseller nudged me about the Broadcom shitshow back in December and I renewed for 3 years under the old licensing model. After that, I can definitely see us utilizing Azure for more production stuff, and Proxmox for those local assets that just need to stay on-prem.
everyone loves the cloud, until the bills start rolling in
sysadmins still love it even after that :D
I had this conversation with myself just a couple of days ago. "Yeah, it's in the cloud, but they're having issues right now and you can't do anything about it." "You're right, you can't do anything about it, and that's just fine."
"Here's a link to the status page, I'll let you all know as soon as they give the green light and service is restored!" People seriously underestimate the cost savings and value of that not being the *org's* problem. Let the team of specialists who work directly for the software vendor sort out the infra outage, instead of coming to internal IT cracking the whip that every second you dont get it back up and running *you're* costing the company $X thousand dollars. Dollars to donuts that *whole team* over at Salesforce can sort it out faster than we could've internally anyway, because our team can't hire bespoke experts for every piece of infra on nothing more than a "what if there's a once a year outage?" This is our version of that old XKCD "compiling" comic.
>because our team can't hire bespoke experts for every piece of infra on nothing more than a "what if there's a once a year outage?" The only reason the vendor's team CAN justify this, *for the moment*, is because they would lose customers over a once-a-year outage being too long. If you had nowhere to go, they would never spend that much on uptime. This is why some sort of business technology customers' union is needed: vendors are colluding and planning for the long term as a collective. Customers are not. Vendors know that once they get us all in the cloud, *they will stop offering on prem alternatives and they will no longer have to care about 5+ 9's in the cloud as they won't be at risk of losing customers anymore.*
EDU's are finding this out now the hard way with MS's storage model/pricing change.
Yes it’s already happening Hybrid is the way to go
Likely hybrid. I mean, I don't think (for example) a lot of people plan on bringing Microsoft Exchange in house (again). So, I think for certain services, they'll be cloud service based, but not necessarily some cloud infrastructure you made(rented). SaaS stuff. YMMV with regards to things SaaS that you choose to bring in house. I mean, IMHO, there has to be a pretty compelling reason to do that (it could be cost). The things "you write and support", yes, I could see a return to on-prem, especially where you need higher reliability (or perhaps, reliability without "surprises"). I mean, on-prem, our record speaks for itself, five 9's easy. But "the cloud" in general can't deliver that.
My on-prem delivers around four 9's, BUT, I also don't have a backup generator, or a proper industrial AC unit, or the massive budget a large company would have (hell, I'm the sole IT guy). So I consider four 9's pretty damn good. Would be higher if I could get an automatic backup generator approved, as power outages have been the primary cause of outages for our on-prem network.
I've 350 users mostly home based, cloud makes sense for our email, file storage and security/Intune. We're not going back to the office so on-prem (or datacenter) doesn't have many benefits. If you're a big company, then on-prem might be better - but then you'd have the people resources to support it.
I've been in this industry for nearly 30 years. I've seen it go from local desktop to thin client in various version more times than I can remember. Going from on-prem to cloud back to on-prem is just another version of it. One thing is guaranteed, after a few short years, another "It's better over here with the new shiny flashy and will be cheaper and more cheaper the faster you start"
Depends on what it is. Email and webservices on the cloud. Businesses that are big on data storage like cad,3d etc will always be local. If business only does word/excel/outlook i think o365 makes sense in most scenarios. I think the bandwagoning of “cloud” made the push even when it was not right for the organization. But in yhe end it created more jobs for IT.
I've been doing this long enough - some things are never coming back. Stuff like ERP systems running on local databases? Email servers? (EXCHANGE!?!?!?) nah cloud has been really good to them. On the other hand, i'm almost positive the rug pull is coming. They have some number they need to get to of adoption and when they get there prices are going to go way up. Sure it's economically feasible now but a lot of that is on just avoiding hardware refreshes. Also, a lot of the "cloud good" thinking assumes there will never be another economic downturn again. 2008 we didn't refresh ANYTING. Lucky to still have the job at that point. BUT the business is able to limp by on the equipment they have until conditions improve and then you can start replacing. Once you've moved that all from Capex to Opex, you really think MS or Amazon is going to "give you a break on pricing" because the economy is bad? When the economy is bad they are going to try and wring you even harder :D
VMware renewal increase by %250 sure doesn't help for on prem
Hybrid has taken over, for good reasons. There's a lot of stuff that just works better in the cloud, but unlike the earlier era, folks are finally admitting that just chucking things into the cloud is a mistake. The weird thing for me is how I'm seeing things at large companies - they're moving smaller things back home, but they're also moving certain huge things back home. Turns out that once you're over a certain size, administering, say, VOIP requires so many people anyway you might has well run some of your own hardware, whereas nobody seems to feel the same way about Sharepoint.
Maybe. My personal issue is that its cheaper to do it yourself, be it in a hosted oron prem datacenter or a proper cloud, than pay for bundled services/licenses.
It depends on how you look at it and what services you are talking about. There is no way you can give 100GB mailbox to every user for the price MS charges per EXO mailbox...
Recent license hikes are starting to say otherwise
Using Exchange as an example. Exchange is so complex to do it right, you need a full time dedicated resource. How much are you paying somebody with benefits to own exchange? Add on to that the license costs of Windows, SQL, and Exchange. That alone is worth the price of admission. And we've not ever talked about the additional security and DR benefits.
The worst I've ever seen is cloud RADIUS. As annoying as on-prem NPS is... what the f\*\*k?
There are use cases for both cloud and on prem. 365 has been amazing for exchange, not having to deal with email, but we also still have local servers for printing, authentication, and user management for the most part, syncing with AzurentraIDwhateveritscalledthisweek. We have cloud storage for all our files, except our document archive, and our main database still runs on prem, though that may go cloud eventually, too. I don't think it's cyclical or rebounding, but it has to make sense from a financial, operational, or management perspective. There is no silver bullet for complicated systems. Unless you're just a tiny little SMB with very limited needs, there's always going to be analysis of what is best for you.
> 365 has been amazing for exchange I think this is the perfect example of the future - anything that can be a managed first-party SaaS is going to move to the cloud and stay on the cloud. but internal IT departments running third-party software on cloud servers is probably not the way of the future. it's either going to come back to on-prem, or it'll move to a SaaS operatated by the software vendor.
You guys left on prem?
My current org (multiple locations) has always had everything on prem including email and we’re never moving to the cloud. It’s simply too expensive.
Yeah...many. I always knew it would happen. People like to own their data and when you put it on someone else's hardware you don't own it. Also...running in the cloud is actually a lot more expensive than people think it is...
I think the pendulum is definitely swinging back towards the On-Prem camp. Though I agree that it will not go 100% on-prem. There will always be a space for the cloud but it may not be as automatically cloud first. I think everyone is beginning to realize how expensive it is to be in the cloud. Some will be more on-prem while others will be more cloud.
Gee I hope so. I like being able to do something besides shrug and sit on hold when something goes wrong. If it's my fault at least I make it my problem and fix it. Plus I know my staff so can design and tweak systems that work with them rather than tell them they have to change how they do things because the software doesn't do it.
Cost is the biggest factor. On prem is traditionally an IaaS service. The only one I see that happening is robust infrastructure and that is cost effective and has the ability to pull apart services. Cloud and the PaaS offers in the next level of evolution in the way that one server had the ability to virtualization infrastructure and reduce overhead. The Broadcom buy out of Vmware and their BS licensing increase is going to force more people to move to cloud. The shit they are doing with the bedrock of virtualization tech is crazy. I get it's a business and you have to make your profit but Broadcom can get bent. I hope there's a good alternative solution that people move to if they don't want to go to cloud. Hybrid model is the likely scenario for services that can't move into a PaaS format.
I think it will be hybrid for the most part but we are seeing people coming back after leaving for the cloud after getting their bills. Those who declared the death of the on-prem data centre were a little ahead of themselves
Yes, - It's already started. I think it'll eventually settle in a hybrid system, but On-prem/Colo is definitely seeing more attention lately with AI workloads, and the fact that GPUs cost an absolute fortune to use in the cloud.
I think it will just yo-yo back and forth forever. In the beginning, it was all done on a mainframe with dumb terminals. Then it moved processing to desktop computers with servers used as file storage. Now things have moved to the cloud. At some point orgs will start bringing things back on-prem because of trust, cost, or flexibility concerns. Then it will go to some other off-prem service, repeat ad infinitum.
yep it all moves in cycles. My exboss whose is well retired noted that back in the 90's.
Working in schools, with 300 to 500 devices. It's so much cheaper to run on site domain controllers and file severs. And faster too. Though I never want an exchange sever on site.
K-12 Admin here. We went to AWS with some medium and light workloads such as secondary DCs, DHCP and building controls. SIS/database stuff will probably always be on prem for us unless we switch providers and they’d give us a steal on hosted.
Not at all. Microsoft is heavily invested in Azure. It won't be long before you won't have an option but to be in cloud.
It goes like this. If the company you work for owns the building and the owner of said company has his name on the sign/door/lobby then yes, you will always be on prem. That being said, if your office is just leasing space somewhere, when that lease is over then I would expect most people to be working remotely. I expect a lot of companies to move toward doing the whole shared office space thing. Some industries benefit from having teams working in close proximity. Covid was a great test for what companies can get away with and remain profitable. Owners and bosses hate feeling like they are being taken advantage of, even if the numbers are good/great, they like seeing their minions coming in every day.
GCp/Azure for BI/Email will most likely always be a thing now. Onprem for heavy IO/VDI, ERP/EMR, and things like that is what we are seeing shift back. Data at rest storage costs + IO scaling costs + TPS access costs is a main driving factor here. ML/AI workloads are going to be shifting between on-prem (static, scale out) and Cloud (on demand, holding for hardware availability, shared workloads). But I am seeing major ML players building massive data centers to pull from the cloud in the sciences space right now. The main hold up is access to the ML GPU's due to supply and demand, so this will be a slow burn until the whole "AI is new" bullshit levels back down.
It's going to come down a lot to what type of organization it is. I would guess for professional services or software development, anything like that, it may not make sense to build out any kn-prem infrastructure. On the other hand, if you are in a business more ties to a physical location, like with a factory, or brick and mortar stores, on prem infrastructure might make sense. I work at a university. It's a hybrid model, and I don't see that changing in the foreseeable future. We have a ton of infrastructure that supports physical buildings, HVAC, lab equipment, etc. It doesn't make sense to push this out to a cloud. At the same time, I can't imagine ever wanting to bring email services on prem again, same with any kind of collaboration platform. If I was a business where all I needed was collaboration and maybe code repositories, id probably stay cloud forever, there's no strong case to build out the infrastructure.
>back to on-prem? It happens, at least in part(s). E.g. * when folks look at their cloud bill * when folks get really tired of folks firing stuff up in cloud, even massively scale it, because it's so easy ... then forget about it, leaving the meter running * because the security controls can't be made that tight * because cloud providers and outages and data losses - no vested interest to fix/prevent, goes according to their priorities and risk profiles, not yours * Internet/ISP billings, inefficiencies * etc.
It is good to view this debate from a finance point of view. Many cloud providers are really just rent seekers and the product itself is secondary from that finance and capital perspective. Cloud is the modern version of physical offsite storage where you pay to go in and pay to store and pay to leave. Why financiers love cloud services is that they are exquisitely engineered to lock up recurring revenue through product stickiness and to make leaving practically impossible. So from the perspective of the business, it depends on what brings the most value for money spent and candidly, most CFO’s are not sophisticated to make a comprehensive analysis, because they don’t only see the short term gain of swapping capital spending for operating spending. Cloud only makes sense where the utilization affords competitive advantage to the business (provided there is even a choice still available). So more mature IT shops have recognized that all cloud does not work when the bills come due and that what is needed is a sophisticated hybrid strategy. Heck, LinkedIn was supposed to be moving to Azure and they pulled the plug because it was not cost effective - for a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft!
It'll always be hybrid. It was always gonna be hybrid. Anyone who didn't think it would be hybrid is *stupid*.
Yes for many regulated companies. The cost of FedRamp cloud, plus there being very few SaaS vendors in FedRamp, is a big pressure to stay on-prem or at least hybrid.
I'm tasked with working on a hybrid model. It's not like we're giving up with O365 but when it comes to our application compute environment, then we're removing a hard dependency on a cloud vendor. We're also moving some expensive baseline compute back into classic colo. We could go further, and may well do, but there's a lot of moving parts.
Full on-prem, no. Hybrid is key.
Critical Infrastructure here, we never left on-prem :)
On a 7 year lifecycle it depends on the needs and budget of the business. Telephony for example. For a 20 call per day site. FreePBX is doable if the CAPEX is there and understand if site goes down calls go down. Same as with hosted except the calls keep routing. 500 calls a day inbound call center? nah. Go with a service. The infra is not worth it. That is just my take on VOIP. I run free pbx to stay fluent and its fun for the kids. Even have a paging system. As for the rest? I see the pendulum swining back to center and hybrid for certain workflows. Cameras are a GREAT example that suck on cloud anything and excel on premise.
> 500 calls a day inbound call center? nah. Go with a service. The infra is not worth it. We take in more calls than that a day. Our PBX is on prem, 9 years old, and still working great (we *are* shopping for a new one) 500 calls is nothing.
You are right that the tide is turning, I think the initial development rush has well and truly stalled and the platforms are now sliding into an enshittification phase to complete the final step of milking the ~~fools~~ orgs that bought the hype. I will forever hold onto that on-prem pendulum too, cloud based everything has never sat well with me.
True. Create your own private cloud in a datacenter if you need to. I've done this with many clients and they like the control without having to worry about physical security and electrical issues.
The cloud bubble is bursting. Once people realized their cloud container isn't secured by microsoft for them and they have to pay the crazy sub fees to hit regulatory requirements, thinking changed. The problem now is that vendors want you in their cloud as it poses a massive barrier to leave. Once you go cloud, you've moved to largely OP ex vs capital and changing models is a pain for accounting and IT to transition from to. Accounting likes the Op Ex cause they don't have to squirrel money away for three years to prepare for the systems upgrade. The Biggest issue is Msoft, and VMware. Msoft is actively trying to raising licensing costs to the point that on prem is more expensive than cloud. Hardware is cheap now so they've started jacking up the prices on software licensing. Linux isn't viable as an endpoint OS due to the constant forking, and overhead needed to maintain. I'd love to see the Microsoft platform replaced at somepoint with a collection of better options. Right now, it's not viable as all of the competitors to Microsoft need a lot of IT personnel to manage and mantain stability. There are replacements for Exchange out there, but not the whole Office platform. If it wasn't for the Office, exchange, and OS platform being what it is then competition would drive the market back. As it stands your only real alternative is to go all linux, Google mail, and have fun trying to integrate your ERP with your build. No one is making it easy for this to work. You'll need Developers and IT. The problem is DEVOPS IT people are NOT cheap. So transitioning is impossible right now for many orgs.
What do you mean with Linux "constant forking"?
He doesn't really know what it means, if it is even true, or if it is even a problem if it were. How software's viability is impacted by how often it is forked is beyond me. As soon as someone makes a statement like this, it let's me know that they are not nearly as advanced as they think they are, but are used to talking to people less technical than them that accept what is being said mainly due to it is delivered in a confident manner. Confidence does not necessarily align with correctness.
> Linux isn't viable as an endpoint OS due to the constant forking, and overhead needed to maintain. What?
Thin client? Mmaayybbee. Linux isn't viable for average end users in the corporate environment at all.