At what point do you sit back and think "perhaps running every workload in a public cloud makes no sense.".

Without getting too buzzy, the whole idea of "cloud repatriation", which is simply just saying "hey, we don't want to run everything in the cloud anymore. Let's bring some stuff back to our datacenters" is a real thing. Not because it's new (running on-prem was where tech started", but because it's beginning to make more and more sense.

Let's talk about how it can be done properly with private cloud.

Why Private Cloud?

The idea of "creating your own cloud" started many years ago, but got pretty popular with OpenStack. The gist essentially is if you:

1. Don't want to run in a public cloud.
2. Can't run in a public cloud for whatever reason (like government reasons).
3. Don't want to spend money on public cloud.

You can create your own cloud-like experience. It'll be on your own hardware (vs the cloud provider's hardware) and run in your datacenters. It'll look, smell, and feel the same as a public cloud, but it'll just be in your datacenters.

Security

Even in 2024, you'll notice that a lot of banks, healthcare, and government sections of the world are still running on-prem. The reason why is that they need to fully control their data, where the data is, and what systems can see the data. Using hybrid cloud (both on-prem and in the cloud) gives the banks, healthcare, and government sectors the best of both worlds.

Building Your Own Hardware

As you're building out a Private Cloud, you're ultimately responsible for hardware components like:

1. CPU
2. RAM (memory)
3. Motherboards

And outside of that, you're responsible for the OS that you're running on. This opens up not only security issues but overall configuration and expertise around what's necessary.

Ironsoftware builds all of its servers and most of the chipset in-house without the need to outsource it.

Scaling

Hypercloud, multi-cloud, hybrid-cloud, or whatever you'd like to call it needs one primary piece to the puzzle - scale out. For example, what do a lot of people want to utilize multi-cloud for? Well, they don't actually need to use multiple services. Really what they want is multi-region.

Furthermore, what they want is the ability to scale out to other services. For example, let's say you're in a hybrid cloud environment and you for whatever reason run out of storage for a particular workload on-prem. The ideal scenario would be to scale out from the on-prem storage to, for example, Azure storage or an AWS S3 bucket.

Ironsoftware gives the ability to scale out to public cloud providers in a scenario like this.

What Works For You?

Regardless of Kubernetes, containerization, or the public cloud, there are still a massive amount of datacenters running. Bare metal still exists and VMs still exist. The truth is that cloud-native doesn't have anything to do with the public cloud. It has to do with how workloads are configured, how they scale, and the fact that it's API/programmatically driven.