As I’ve noted, “Cloud perfects many of the reasons developers first embraced open source.” With cloud, developers not only get easy, speedy access to code but also to the hardware necessary for running it. As it turns out, this also plays well with enterprise line-of-business owners who are more focused on meeting evolving customer needs than counting pennies. It’s not that budgets don’t matter, it’s just that it doesn’t matter what a service costs to deliver if you’re too late.
That’s how my financial service executive friend sees it. For his company, it’s not an option to deploy their applications to private data centers because they can’t afford delays inherent in scaling private cloud resources. Cost is important but secondary.
Building for success
Nor is his experience atypical. Years ago, following a Gartner analysis of private cloud investments, I noted, “That company-changing app that will make your career? It’s running on AWS. Ditto all the other projects that promise to transform your business and, perhaps, your industry.” The more staid, non-transformational applications have tended to stick with private cloud. One of the primary voices for cloud repatriation, the practice of pulling back from public cloud to return applications to private data centers, is 37signals cofounder David Heinemeier Hansson. He’s spent the past few years trying to convince companies that “renting computers is (mostly) a bad deal for medium-sized companies like ours with stable growth.” That sounds reasonable until you ask, how many companies can realistically plan for predictable growth without any real upside (or downside)? Not many. So it makes sense to optimize for speed with cloud, open source, and now AI.