Thoughts on reverse cloud migration

As a cloud advocate, people always send me company blog posts saying “we are moving off the cloud” (like Dropbox). Many companies have gone back and forth between on-premises and cloud hosting over time, landing into a blend of both solutions. Sometimes they run development workloads in the cloud and production on-prem, sometimes the other way round.

37signals is the latest company to announce its move off the cloud and invest in an on-prem solution. This move is one clear scenario where moving back on-prem can make sense.

Before launch, they focused on building a product that customers would love. They didn’t spend resources on infrastructure and hosted everything in the cloud.

Now that they have consistent capacity requirements, that they are not looking to do significant product innovation, and that they have the right talent to manage the infrastructure it makes sense to invest in a private hosting environment. They can reduce the long-term infrastructure cost by hosting it themselves. Given that they are not looking to have exponential growth or have hundreds of developers working on their product, the opportunity cost argument is mute making the decision even more accessible.

One aspect that I’d love to hear more about from 37signals (and other on-prem migrations) is how they plan to deal with security. This aspect is usually relegated until it is too late and infrastructure teams end up having to figure out how to manage multiple security tools that get bolted onto the systems way too late. Moreover, I assume (hope?) that even if they are moving some infrastructure off the cloud, they still use some cloud-based tools to manage large influxes of traffic like DDoS attacks and use a cloud-based WAF at their gateway. Doing so would reduce the burden of mitigating these issues on-prem.

There is no doubt that the investment in the cloud overall keeps growing, Gartner forecasts that cloud usage will reach nearly $500 billion this year. Companies do so because of the flexibility, speed, and consistency that the cloud brings to them. Many users never see the infrastructure costs going down (most see them go up) but as a company, they are not required to invest talent and resources into infrastructure.

Overall, running your servers will make sense if you have the time, money, and talent as well as having an acceptable opportunity cost. That said, the investment required to run infrastructure should not be minimized and companies should have a security strategy as they move to a hybrid/on-prem model.