For the last few years, we’ve seen no shortage of cloud migration stories and felt pressure from management who wanted to migrate our systems to the cloud. It seems that almost everyone I speak to has a story of having to move a system out of their owned or leased data center into a public cloud from some vendor. A lot of this is the movement of VMs from one place to another, which has me scratching my head. If we’re just running VMs, surely we can do this cheaper in our own data center.
Perhaps, though there are a lot of costs to setting up or running a data center, and it’s not easy getting a system in place that allows a bit of self-service for our customers. Especially while ensuring that images used are properly patched and secured, while ensuring lots of easy connectivity to storage that can be reconfigured easily. It might not be worth the effort for a few dozen VMs, but if you have hundreds of systems, maybe it is.
Maybe it’s happening. I keep seeing stories about repatriation from the cloud. I also caught the global data center trend report, which shows a lot of growth in the data center world. Vacancy rates are low and there is continued demand for building more data centers. Some of this is due to public cloud providers, some is from AI companies who need lots of power and GPUs, and some is from private companies looking to collocate their systems.
The world is becoming more and more dependent lots of servers in data centers. I expect that we will continue to see more data centers built, but I expect fewer and fewer private, corporate data centers. More than likely all of us will use someone else’s data center, even if we choose to own the computing systems. Even Basecamp, which left the cloud, is using a collocation facility for machines, which means they are using a facility owned by another organization and shared with other clients. However, they own the servers they use, which are just located in someone else’s data center.
If any of you have private data centers, my guess is most of those will slowly fade away over time. The cost of running them privately will exceed that of what vendors will charge. Data center vendors can spread the cost of buildings, power, networking, cooling, etc. across multiple clients, often hundreds or thousands. While you might not be in the cloud, and you may still own your own computers, you’ll likely store and connect them in someone else’s data center.
That means that most of us will need to be comfortable with limits on the hardware deployed and amount of upgrades available. In the cloud you’re limited to what vendors provide. In our own collation spaces, it might be what our core IT group makes available. I still expect database servers to be among the largest machines available, but there will still be limits to what most of us can provision. After all, most IT groups still want some standard configurations shared by most of their servers. That might be an interesting trade-off for some of us as the cloud might be more or less preferable in certain situations.
Steve Jones
Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Spotify, or iTunes.
Note, podcasts are only available for a limited time online.
Voice of the DBA 
I think much of these trends are economics and cost driven. My read is that you can get colo space today at a reasonable price, and there’s plenty of competition in the space which keeps the colo providers honest and prevents them from balooning their prices way above actual costs.
Using the cloud can be great for certain things, where the value is commensurate with the price. The value is especially strong at smaller scale – letting a provider do the “heavy lifting” while you focus on your business logic is super valuable.
When we see larger companies do a pivot back toward self-managing some level of the stack, it’s probably because they’ve reached a scale where their internal cost-benefit analysis showed they could do it significantly cheaper themselves. That analysis is hard because there are a lot of ongoing operational costs that are hard to quantify (eg. providers have world-class security staff and experience dealing with unexpected infra problems) – but there are cases where it makes economic sense.
If colo providers did a bunch of consolidation and started inflating prices then I wouldn’t be surprised to see larger enterprises start laying their own concrete again. But at the moment I don’t see it on the horizon.
LikeLike