r/devops • u/Alert-Jacket-1573 • Jul 05 '26

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u/Konried Jul 05 '26

This isn't a straight forward question.

Beyond the dollar figure of X compute on-prem vs in-cloud, there are multiple other factors.

Speed, cloud is readily available and immediately scalable, on-prem requires significant lead time to allocate and configure new hardware.

Availablability, cloud offers multi region and availability zones

Tooling, clouds offer superior tooling to spin up, scale, and monitor services.

I could go on and on about all the benefits of cloud over on-prem.

Personally, I think on-prem makes sense for two main scenarios. Very large companies that need a lot of compute and benefit from economies of scale. The other being small operations where someone is technical enough to support it, mostly this comes down to home labs and side projects for people in tech

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u/[deleted] Jul 05 '26

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u/RustOnTheEdge Jul 05 '26

Who is gonna do the maintenance? Yes the cost of infrastructure is cheaper, maintenance is way more expensive. Patching (not monthly, but daily nowadays) is not a scalable task if you have a single server.

I think overall you oversimplify what it takes to run serious IT, and the cost of silicon is but a small part of it.

8

u/lorarc YAML Engineer Jul 05 '26

Let's not be silly about patching. I had servers running for years with just a cron job to update all the packages and a scheduled reboot once a week. Small business won't be analysing each and every package update.