The presenters look so stiff and rehearsed, and the makeup and lighting are so bland that it feels like an AI-generated video!

Star Wars: Episode V - I am your Father

I some point hoped that IBM and Red Hat would evolve into a ‘reverse takeover,’ where Red Hat’s culture would eventually take precedence over IBM’s. According to many friends, that outcome is still far from happening

Meanwhile, we’re transitioning to on-premises infrastructure due to the increasing complexity of cloud services. Kubernetes and Docker are powerful platforms—we love them—but they were never meant to be cost-driven. Kubernetes is already incredibly efficient. However, surviving cloud costs and avoiding its traps requires granular cost control—far beyond just monitoring RAM, network, or CPU usage. It’s become overwhelming.

In a nutshell, any K8S deployment on-premises tends to be inherently optimized, saving a significant amount of time and resources. I have new servers and old servers in the same cluster, that is epic.

Modern FinOps often feels like a frustrating exercise: Should I choose 2x 2XXL instances or 4x 8XL instances? The conversation rarely focuses on optimizing software performance or database efficiency. Instead, the cloud has turned into a maze of cost centers, where it’s easy to get lost in ‘managing’ the cloud rather than building valuable products for end users.

sorry optimizing sql queries isn't a priority this quarter, could you write a business justification for it so we can ask in the next sprint planning if it can be scored against our business needs?

thanks!

p.s. we got some complaints about slowness on a few pages. can you schedule some time to sync up and take a look? we need to get this solved!

That’s exactly my point. Instead of optimizing software, FinOps nowadays focuses on optimizing costs. While they might seem similar, they couldn’t be more different. We spend 100% our time optimizing our software, databases, etc. if we need more capacity we just add a new server to the cluster. But this hard on the cloud, easy onprem.

Which part is hard on the cloud? Optimization or adding capacity?

IBM thrives on complexity—that’s the core of many of their products and business model. The fact that even they are getting into ‘cloud cost optimization’ should be a signal for everyone to rethink public cloud strategies.

I’m not convinced that IBM’s ecosystem and business model is more complex than, say, market leader AWS.

I’d contend IBM thrives on selling hidden complexity to those who don’t know better.

Like Linux and GCC? /s

congrats on your App!

Thank you!

Aside from the traditional and expected bells and whistles, are there any major core improvements?

Answering my own question, it looks like window tiling is finally solved.

Apple always delivers what its customers want, after all alternatives have been exhausted.

Isn’t that the very definition of what an upcoming release should do?

Not at all. It is a poor pattern because they throw a kernel over the wall right before the freeze, then refuse to fix any of the bugs, because of the freeze.

The kernel should go out to general testing as soon as the cycle starts, not right before it ends.

Now that you’ve mentioned this, I feel compelled to share the lessons we’ve learned from moving from the cloud to on-premises.

Kudos! We’ve successfully migrated away from the cloud, and it was an epic decision. It’s cheaper, insanely faster, easier to maintain, and unexpectedly more secure. I strongly recommend any startup or corporation to explore how modern frameworks like K8S, Ansible, Proxmox, and OpenStack—whichever suits your needs—can be incredibly easier to manage on-premises.

> unexpectedly more secure

How so?

* Fewer things to manage.

* Less prone to human error. We have one well-secured, central firewall that only a few developers can access. So, even if a developer forgets to properly secure something downstream, it will still be protected by the firewall. One could argue that this is possible in the cloud, but managing VPCs, etc., introduces risks. There’s always the possibility of something critical being left outside the VPC. On-prem, there’s no way something can physically escape our ethernet cables.

* IAM and bucket management issues. Anything in the cloud is inherently exposed to the Internet and, in most cases, open by default. You need to manage countless IAM configurations.

* Physical inspection. We can actually look at our setup, and if necessary, visually inspect if a server is physically encrypted.

* Simplicity and transparency. Things are simpler and more straightforward: Storage is storage, a disk is a disk, and ethernet is ethernet. Canot stress how beatufill this is, even with 100 servers it easy to manage them than in the cloud.

* Modern open-source software. Modern open-source solutions have incorporated many smart features from the cloud, making on-premise setups more powerful and easier to manage.

Well your private data isn't hosted in a public cloud, for starters.

What’s the difference between having your data in an AWS data center versus having it in Hetzner’s data center from the point of view of “private data in cloud”?

(Good move IMO nevertheless)

Your own hardware in a data center is specced, procured, installed, managed, and operated by you, which is more secure and more provable than letting anyone else do all that.

But they said on prem. Hetzner or any other data center is not on prem.

Ah.. TFA is on a Hetzner vps. Well it's 2 different conversations anyway. TFA doesn't say they did it for security but for efficiency.

it's a dedicated machine fwiw

This like this is what made us leave the cloud and go back to our own private cloud.