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After rushing to the cloud, businesses have begun moving workloads back on premises
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But managing on-prem infrastructure isn't for everyone
- Rather than thinking of a one-way journey to the cloud, MinIO's CTO argued the industry should adopt a more flexible mindset that allows for different operating models
Businesses once rushed to the cloud as a destination. Now, though, their perspective has shifted to accommodate an evolving operating model, Ugur Tigli, CTO of open-source data storage company MinIO, told Silverlinings. That shift means the industry can’t keep looking at repatriating as a U-turn, he argued.
“We always talk about repatriation as one way,” he told Silverlinings. “Whether you're on public cloud, private cloud, edge, different places — it just doesn't matter.”
Cloud repatriation generally refers to a business moving workloads from a cloud environment back to on-premises infrastructure, often a data center or private cloud. Tigli reasoned that rather than looking at cloud repatriation as a solitary, linear reversal, it’s time the industry looked at repatriation as an individual tailoring of the cloud operating model — which can take many different shapes.
As the pandemic propelled many businesses to make hasty shifts to the cloud, they subsequently found themselves reckoning with complicated multi-cloud environments — a shift IBM predicted back in the early waves of Covid-19 and reaffirmed in a report last year.
With issues of interoperability, rising costs of object storage in public clouds, compliance requirements and unconsolidated workloads, reassessment meant cloud repatriation for some companies.
Some repatriated and saved millions by developing their own infrastructure. Others, however, have argued repatriation is a mistake since public clouds allow businesses to leverage big tech resources. A Forrester report even asserted that moving back on-prem after considerable cloud investment was a “retreat.”
But Tigli contended that it may be time to abandon the idea of “repatriation” and instead understand the cloud operating model as one to customize for a specific business’ needs. In some cases that means moving specific storage data back home, while in others it might mean relocating workloads closer to the edge.
From Tigli’s perspective, what truly matters is that each enterprise assesses how to implement a cloud operating model in a way that sustains “performance at scale.”
It’s about the model, not the destination
MinIO first gained prominence with its flagship open-source product, MinIO Object Storage, compatible with Amazon S3. Tigli explained that from the company’s inception, the focus has always been how to support any and “all architectural choices.”
“You can save costs by staying on-prem and designing things very well, by not going to [a public] cloud, because there are certain efficiencies,” he said, citing when Bank of America saved billions by building its own cloud infrastructure. “It depends on what you optimize for.”
MinIO CEO and Co-Founder Anand Babu Periasamy emphasized this focus on optimization to Silverlinings in an earlier email interview, saying it’s “the easiest and fastest way to achieve near-term cost savings” through eliminating cloud resource waste.
“Some workloads are born in the public cloud. Some workloads grow out of it. Others are just better on the private cloud. It will depend. The key is to operationalize the new processes in such a way as to achieve ongoing cost savings,” Periasamy wrote.
Tigli did note that for some MinIO clients who are repatriating, the “surprise” challenge is managing the “unseen part of the iceberg” that is building and overseeing their own infrastructure — buying servers, managing data centers and dealing with the system problems that public cloud providers once managed.
“Their challenge is starting this new world of managing the physical infrastructure because in the cloud, they never had to deal with this,” he explained. Thus, a model that is best for one business may be crippling for another and “this repatriation story can be both ways,” Tigli concluded.