When Microsoft first announced its Azure cloud service, there were plenty of sceptical comments about enterprises not being interested until there was a way they could run it themselves.
In one sense that's missing the point of cloud; how can you get the cost benefits of elastic, on-demand computing if you insist on buying all your own servers?
But the reason we're not all running all of our server workloads on cloud services such as Azure and AWS isn't just because network bandwidth and latency can still be issues. It's because large companies need the kind of control you get by owning and running your own server hardware, at least for some of their workloads.
|