Geico repatriates work from the cloud, continues ambitious infra overhaul

I&#x27;ve directly participated in this project and all I have to say is this: the same madness that created a super complex and unmanageable environment in the cloud is now in charge of creating a super easy and manageable environment on premises. The PoC had barely been approved and there was already legacy stuff in the new production environment.<p>Geico&#x27;s IT will slow to a crawl in the next years due to the immense madness of supporting Kubernetes on top of OpenStack on top of Kubernetes (yes, that&#x27;s what they are doing).

They had an expensive, fractured, hard to maintain on-prem layout. Then they moved to the cloud. And it turned out the cloud was expensive, fractured, and hard to maintain. So they&#x27;re moving to on-prem.<p>Any bets on what&#x27;s going to happen next?

If you don&#x27;t have strong seasonality or not expecting a significant ramp up of compute demand (true for startups) why bother with the cloud?<p>It is not more secure, I read every quarter about downtime events, and more importantly you have 0 control of your costs.<p>Your company is likely not Amazon, you will do fine if you have your on prem computers.

A company with the size and financial resources of Geico ought to be able to handle on-prem just fine. I am a huge public cloud fan, but it is definitely not a great (or even good) fit for everyone.

Cloud provides the CIO the same opportunities for advancement that COOs have had for years.<p>Staff costs too high? Outsource. Opex too high? Insource.<p>You can spend a career jumping among companies swinging the pendulum back and forth.

What a shame that the most interesting thing we can discuss about software now is where the computer its running on is located.<p>I must admit. The computer was never the part of software that interested me.

I&#x27;d gladly pay 2.5x more to not use OpenStack ever again.

&gt; In an interview with The Stack she confirmed the shift, saying “we have a lot of data – and it turns out that storage in the cloud is one of the most expensive things you can do in the cloud, followed by AI in the cloud…”<p>This has been the story for 20 years now. Not even exaggerating. We all knew it was expensive from the get-go because we all did things on prem.

I feel like even in Geico&#x27;s case, once they&#x27;ve paid salaries for everyone who&#x27;s going to need to maintain this infra they&#x27;re bringing in-house they&#x27;re probably not saving <i>that</i> much. Then again, maybe they were already paying those salaries redundantly to all the services they were spending on, e.g. managed databases.

Is building things cloud provider agnostic a thing? Is building things cloud or on prem agnostic a thing?