Often it’s simply the principle of the excluded middle.
If not for the rent seeking behavior of AWS and its cohort, the answer to ”own or rent” would be clear. The answer is “yes”.
Running a data center means you have your own sheep, which means you need shepherds. Shepherds are very useful to have when you have a question about sheep, especially when those questions are about how to manage or use sheep to best effect.
An approachable shepherd can save the rest of the company a lot of money on missteps and bad assumptions, but if you start getting rid of all the sheep, the shepherd will leave too.
We should be using cloud providers for DR, and for regional load balancing. But the company should be maintaining at least one data center of their own, in the same time zones as most of their developers.
I mostly blame Dell and IBM for this. IBM experimented with making server rooms easier to maintain 15-20 years ago and didn’t make it stick. Others ran with some of those ideas. Dell… I don’t know what Dell has done but I know nobody has been writing about it, so from a visibility standpoint they have done nothing.
If/when someone makes it easier (reduced labor) to manage your own servers, the pendulum will swing back.
If not for the rent seeking behavior of AWS and its cohort, the answer to ”own or rent” would be clear. The answer is “yes”.
Running a data center means you have your own sheep, which means you need shepherds. Shepherds are very useful to have when you have a question about sheep, especially when those questions are about how to manage or use sheep to best effect.
An approachable shepherd can save the rest of the company a lot of money on missteps and bad assumptions, but if you start getting rid of all the sheep, the shepherd will leave too.
We should be using cloud providers for DR, and for regional load balancing. But the company should be maintaining at least one data center of their own, in the same time zones as most of their developers.
I mostly blame Dell and IBM for this. IBM experimented with making server rooms easier to maintain 15-20 years ago and didn’t make it stick. Others ran with some of those ideas. Dell… I don’t know what Dell has done but I know nobody has been writing about it, so from a visibility standpoint they have done nothing.
If/when someone makes it easier (reduced labor) to manage your own servers, the pendulum will swing back.