Tl;dr: We’re going to need a bigger boat array of telescopes to find evidence of significant cloud repatriation
Let’s belabor the great cloud repatriation movement just a little longer!
The Platformonomics Repatriation Index™ is a quick and dirty heuristic that compares the revenue of the two biggest data centers operators with Amazon Web Services, the cloud bellwether.
If cloud repatriation is actually happening, Digital Realty Trust and Equinix should be among the biggest beneficiaries, and we’d expect them to grow relative to AWS. Alas (if you’re a repatriation patriot, henceforth dubbed re-patriot), that is not the case.
The Platformonomics Repatriation Index™ hit a new all-time low in Q4 2022. Even as AWS growth slows, the data center champions are growing even more slowly.
The cloud providers are growing faster on much higher revenue bases than the data center companies.
Beyond any data-driven assessment, we also must visit the primary cloud repatriation discussion venue: the anecdata arena.
Re-Patriot Developments
37signals, aspiring re-patriot poster child (and who are also still just an aspirant when it comes to having actually repatriated from the cloud), have discovered since our last installment that it can be expensive to procure your own infrastructure: “The only thing worse than cloud pricing is the enterprisey alternatives”.
37signals has been transparent about their “obscene” costs. There is some skepticism they can do better. We will continue to follow with interest their journey of discovery (and probable dissatisfaction with all the things).
De-Patriot Developments
Moving in the opposite direction is Uber, which “for the first time is going fully into the cloud, moving its information technology off its own data centers, as it looks to cut costs and refocus engineering efforts.” The company’s CTO “said the effort will help Uber shift its engineers from managing data centers to “areas that make differentiation for our product” and to supporting its cloud move.” Uber also highlighted that, because of their scale, cloud providers get first access to advanced CPUs and that hardware deliveries to Uber were taking over a year due to supply chain issues. I eagerly await 37signals’ plan to skip to the front of the silicon line.