At work we have very beefy workstations that just aren't available in those hardware specs from cloud vendors. They use workstation grade hardware (A6000 GPU, threadrippers) that offer better performance/price than similarly sized cloud offerings which use datacenter type hardware. To actually tick all same boxes you'd need to go for much larger instance types.
Plus it would be questionable whether one could realize the scaling benefit of the cloud because those machines are more pets than cattle, killing them over night and bringing up a clean system the next day would likely upset dozens of different workflows and tweaked setups.
And then the software expects network filesystems with low latency random access, not blob storage...
They did the cost calculations, buying hardware is cheaper in the long run, including ops.
And then there are customers that have extremely stringent security demands. Segregated networks, video surveillance, no data must leave the premises. Convincing them to move the data into the cloud might not be impossible but it would be a big recertification ordeal for one cloud vendor. And then we'd be locked into that vendor until we could get something else. And we have several such customers.
At work we have very beefy workstations that just aren't available in those hardware specs from cloud vendors. They use workstation grade hardware (A6000 GPU, threadrippers) that offer better performance/price than similarly sized cloud offerings which use datacenter type hardware. To actually tick all same boxes you'd need to go for much larger instance types. Plus it would be questionable whether one could realize the scaling benefit of the cloud because those machines are more pets than cattle, killing them over night and bringing up a clean system the next day would likely upset dozens of different workflows and tweaked setups. And then the software expects network filesystems with low latency random access, not blob storage... They did the cost calculations, buying hardware is cheaper in the long run, including ops.
And then there are customers that have extremely stringent security demands. Segregated networks, video surveillance, no data must leave the premises. Convincing them to move the data into the cloud might not be impossible but it would be a big recertification ordeal for one cloud vendor. And then we'd be locked into that vendor until we could get something else. And we have several such customers.