The Great Cloud Repatriation Debate - Compute
ArchitectingIT, February 7th, 2023
In the past week, we've seen two announcements from cloud companies that talk about extending the life of existing hardware. 'Sweating the asset' is a well-known strategy to reduce costs, so in a world of 'as-a-service' public cloud infrastructure, is there anything a typical business can do to reduce the bottom line bill?
Meta (the owner of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram) has announced plans to reduce costs by extending the lifetime of servers and networking equipment from four to five years. Google is following a similar path, extending hardware lifetime from four to six years, with an anticipated saving of $3.4 billion for FY2023. Microsoft has also extended to six years (as reported here), while AWS announced intentions to extend hardware lifetime back in February 2022.
We should highlight that much of this infrastructure will be for back-end services rather than being directly used by cloud computing customers. However, the logic of this article applies in both cases.