I’ve been on a team managing on-prem data centers for nearly 2 decades at a larger place.
At one point they did a study to see if it would be cheaper to go to AWS, and the conclusion was that it was cheaper to run our own. We have some stuff in the public cloud now, but it’s still more expensive than running our own.
One of the biggest things I see, at least on the surface, is that there are certain sunk costs with on-prem. If you can do more with the same hardware (licensing costs aside), it really doesn’t cost much to add a VM or container. Whereas with the public cloud everything comes with a price tag and there is a much greater cost to leaving your dev server running when not actively using it, or that pet project that is helpful, but not in a way that’s quantifiable in dollars and cents. This is how companies end up with old laptops in closets and under desks running critical tools.
At one point they did a study to see if it would be cheaper to go to AWS, and the conclusion was that it was cheaper to run our own. We have some stuff in the public cloud now, but it’s still more expensive than running our own.
One of the biggest things I see, at least on the surface, is that there are certain sunk costs with on-prem. If you can do more with the same hardware (licensing costs aside), it really doesn’t cost much to add a VM or container. Whereas with the public cloud everything comes with a price tag and there is a much greater cost to leaving your dev server running when not actively using it, or that pet project that is helpful, but not in a way that’s quantifiable in dollars and cents. This is how companies end up with old laptops in closets and under desks running critical tools.