Why some businesses are quietly leaving the public cloud

The public cloud continues to get the limelight. But many are quietly backing away. Here's why a hybrid or even private cloud might make more sense.

The evolving cloud

The rise of the public cloud has been nothing short of phenomenal. And its many advantages are well-established:

• No upfront cost.
• Get started immediately.
• Ideal for highly variable workloads.

I had a ringside seat through the heady days as the public cloud took off, attending conferences, interviewing executives, and poring through press releases.

I've had the chance to:

• Follow the data centre builds of cloud giants.
• Learn details of cloud-scale infrastructure.
• Write about new cloud features.

But something else was happening even as enterprises sought to migrate to the public cloud.

Private cloud

While many found tremendous success by embracing the public cloud, others found it unsuitable - and moved to private clouds instead.

• The first time I heard of a large private cloud was at a conference in 2017 where Adobe shared how it moved its Advertising Cloud to a VMware-powered private cloud running OpenStack.
• At a private roundtable event two years ago, a colocation provider shared the story of a Singapore-based streaming firm that significantly pared down its 6-digit cloud bill with a private cloud.
• Earlier this year, the infrastructure head of an Indonesian streaming provider told me how public cloud auto-scaling simply wasn't fast enough for his firm's unique requirements (It crashes).

Clearly, the public cloud isn't always the solution to every use case.

Common complaints of the public cloud

Here are some other complaints about the public cloud:

• High recurring fees.
• Unpredictable costs; bill shock.
• The hidden tax of egress charges.

Others are more nuanced.

For instance, some businesses prefer not to be "locked" into a single public cloud platform. Yet multi-cloud deployments are fiendishly complex.

It might not make sense to refactor legacy apps for the cloud. But forcing a cloud migration would mean the workloads won't benefit - and could even run poorly.

The right cloud for the right workload

Ultimately, the choice of cloud really depends on one's organisational requirements and workloads.

I don't have quantitative data to back my observation, but I've heard of at least one bank that went from bold public cloud declaration... to expanding its private cloud in their data centre.

Public, hybrid or private: Do you have an anecdote or a story - from someone else, of course - to share?