More than one and a half years back, I made a tweet asking peopleWhen startups grow, do they stay in the cloud or move to their own datacenter?
I got multiple responses with some saying that they will continue to stay in the cloud as they don’t have to incur Capex and they can stay lean and others saying that they will move to their own datacenters. I was always curious to know the thinking that goes on among those who matter in such successful startups. If they move away from the cloud, why do they want to do it and why successful startups with high growth don’t see the cloud in the same way they saw when they were just two people with dreams to change the world upside down.
There is another clue to this question today with an announcement by Twitter that they are planning to build datacenters in the state of Utah and move towards the end of this year.
Later this year, Twitter is moving our technical operations infrastructure into a new, custom-built data center in the Salt Lake City area. We’re excited about the move for several reasons.
Well, this is not all that surprising for me because we have seen many such companies move to their own datacenters after achieving a certain level of growth. In fact, Twitter is not even moving from cloud to their own datacenter. Rather, they are moving from a managed hosting to their own datacenter. This is a pretty normal evolution. But, what surprised me was one of the reasons they gave for their move.
Second, Twitter will have full control over network and systems configuration, with a much larger footprint in a building designed specifically around our unique power and cooling needs. Twitter will be able to define and manage to a finer grained SLA on the service as we are managing and monitoring at all layers.
This justification can come from any company moving from the cloud to their own datacenter too. If every successful consumer focussed company is going to demand full control over network and system configuration and they want to be the person defining the SLAs, it is a big trouble for the public clouds. When consumer focussed companies are so obsessed with control and SLAs, there is no way enterprises are going to embrace public clouds anytime soon. Either we need a change in mindset of the companies in both the consumer space and the enterprise space or public cloud providers have to do more to lure them towards clouds. I would love to hear from startups, SaaS companies, enterprise IT folks, etc. on this topic. Please add your comment below or contact me through this form.
PS: Thanks to William Vambenepe for getting me started on this topic.
Additional Reading:
You can’t compare Twitter to every other business in the world.
Also you are looking at the utilization of the Cloud in a wholly inverted way, IMHO, because you are asking a temporal question (“do they grow out..”). What makes better sense to ask in my opinion is “Will they.. 10 years from now?
The public Cloud today is like the public electricity distribution system in its early days. The super critical orgs (defence establishments, communication hubs etc) got a public electricity connection but mainly relied on their dedicated generators (which are the equivalent of the datacenters). The rest of the orgs simply got the public connections because they couldn’t afford dedicated generators and/or the staff to maintain them. Over time the dedicated generators’ footprint grew progressive smaller and they got deployed increasingly less frequently. The generators didn’t die, they just became minor players for everyone, except for a very small minority of super critical orgs.
The practice continues to this day, even in America where public electricity distribution to a home/business doesn’t get interrupted for more than 5-10 minutes cumulative in a typical year.
Eventually the Cloud will serve that same purpose and the private datacenter will shrink but not go away completely. Giant orgs like Twitter will keep them but eventually to the same degree that they will keep their own electricity generators. If we wish to plan and advice clients for the future, prevalent practice in this year will not be a good indicator to learn from.
I think you missed my point in the post. I never said that growing out of cloud is a trend to stay. I pointed out to this trend (not just twitter but many other startups I have spoken to) so that public cloud providers can do what is needed to change this trend in the coming years. I am in the “public cloud is the future” school from day 1.