You are crazy if you don’t start in Cloud. You are crazy if you continue to stay on it !

As the whole world is adopting cloud and Digital transformation is at its pinnacle of focus for almost 100% of business worldwide this may look to be a crazy statement. The truth lies in the details. Thanks to Sarah Wang and Martin Casdo from a16z.com for unpeeling the onion in their article "The Cost of Cloud, a Trillion Dollar Paradox"

Before you go much deeper into the document and analysis that substantiates the statement, I wanted to share some more perspectives on this. Having recently worked on few large cloud transformation opportunities for Fortune 100 organizations where economics of infrastructure spend was a key while driving efficiency from operations without compromising on Agility and Scalability. When we started putting together the blueprint for the future Hybrid cloud environment the business case on the Private Cloud footprint (obviously consolidated footprint across multiple Data centers) based on the modern evolved Hardware stack with a blend of Open source and enterprise grade platform was coming to less than half of the public cloud spend for a 5 to 6 years term. For all those who wonder what sizing and configuration was considered on the Cloud for the comparison, a like to like was throwing up the business case by 2.5 to 3x and to get to this close to what i mentioned above we had to use the special discounts offered by the service provider on top of the reserved instance prices and custom-build processor.

Key take away from the article.

• Public Cloud alternatives have evolved significantly over a period and can be built, deployed, and managed entirely in a Pure Opex model instead of large capital expenditures.
• New Age Application development at the early stages seldom investigates the aspect of Infrastructure optimization as the focus initially is on the experience and global reach that can be driven from the services and additional features that can be rolled out at a greater velocity.
• Organizations tend to realize the need to optimize the cloud spend when it hits the threshold of growth from a particular service and wants to drive efficiency from cost of running the particular service.
• Repatriation from Cloud is not an easy process as born in the cloud applications are mostly locked into the Cloud services and rewrites tend to be more complex. The advice is to leverage more of Containers and Kubernetes from the initial stages and set of guiding principles of zero lock in. 
• Cloud Optimization aspects includes looking through the System design, implementation, re-architecture, third-party cloud efficiency solutions, or moving workloads to special purpose hardware
• Repatriation to be mostly focused on resource intensive workloads and the target state for any organization stays as Hybrid with a 30:70 on Cloud.

Again, Organizations venturing into this needs the right Engineering talent, Technical leadership, and Scale to support the on-premise Infrastructure. Cloud service providers are innovating at a rapid scale and they have a high R&D budget offering innovative services helping in higher velocity of feature developments. For someone to venture into this need to also make sure that they need to have the right technology roadmap and investments to keep the environment future proofed. When more large cloud companies are into the fray the competition can become more intense with severe pricing pressures.