“The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion.”
Larry Ellison
In our era, the cloud is the haute couture of infrastructure. Everyone wants it. Everyone says you need it. And few ask whether it actually fits.
This post is for those who remember that not every problem needs 12 layers of abstraction. It's for careful builders who believe that owning your tools is better than renting your soul.
And here are 12 reasons why on-premise will outlast the hype.
1. Cloud Is Renting the Same Hardware for Triple the Price
The cloud sells convenience, but charges premium rent, forever. When you buy servers, you own an asset. When you rent a VM, you feed a meter. The cloud is like living in a hotel room and bragging you don’t have to fix the faucet.
Sure, but you’re paying 10× the mortgage and still can’t open a window.
2. DevOps Became a Way to Work 24/7
DevOps was meant to unify teams. Instead, it blurred boundaries: developer and admin, work and sleep, code and ops. Now every developer is also on call. This "you build it, you run it" culture leads to burnout, not harmony.
3. Complexity Is Not a Virtue
In the old days, a deployment was make install. Now it's a procession of YAML files, container registries, ephemeral environments, secrets managers, Terraform pipelines, and CI/CD rituals that often do less than a Bash script with rsync.
The industry calls this “modern infrastructure”. I call it complexity theater.
Many engineers grew up on the UNIX philosophy — small, composable tools, each doing one job well. But this doesn’t mean they signed up for a balkanized mesh of microservices, each with its own language, API, database, and dev team. Microservices often don’t simplify — they multiply: bugs, failure points, logging silos, and deployment dependencies.
Abstraction without necessity is just friction in disguise. Ask yourself: Do you need ten services—or just ten functions?
4. You Will Regret Vendor Lock-In
When you rent your stack, the landlord can raise the rent—or remove the plumbing. Cloud APIs change, regions go down, and cost models shift.
Take CoreWeave, a cloud provider for AI workloads: they’ve accumulated $7.5 billion in debt, much of it due to aggressive infrastructure expansion without sustainable financial models. They now face $1 billion/year in interest. Growth without sovereignty is a debt spiral.
5. Not Every Company Needs Speed. Some Need Sanity
There’s a cult of speed in DevOps: deploy 50 times a day! But most companies — municipalities, utilities, banks — don’t need to push hourly patches. They need reliability.
A 2025 Vertice survey showed that 55% of CFOs saw cloud spending increase year-over-year, and 24% called it “significant.” These weren’t startup execs—they were finance leaders. The "move fast" mantra, unchecked, has real financial consequences.
6. Data Wants to Stay Home
For many industries, data is too large or too sensitive to outsource. Petabytes of sensor data, medical records, or real-time video don’t want to live in some abstract region. They want proximity. They want privacy. And often, regulators demand it.
When regulators ask, “Where is the data?” — you can’t answer “uh... us-east-1”. You need direct control. On-premise allows you to define, audit, and defend your policies with confidence.
Compliance is not a checkbox, not something to outsource! Regulatory compliance isn’t just a checklist — it’s a legal and financial time bomb, especially when you're storing personal data somewhere in the cloud. Frameworks like GDPR in Europe and HIPAA in the U.S. demand strict control over where data resides, who can access it, and how it’s processed. Cloud vendors offer compliance-ready services, but when breaches or misconfigurations occur, it's your organization — not AWS, GCP or Azure —writing the check.
Consider these real-world reminders:
💰 TikTok's €530 Million Fine: In May 2025, Ireland's Data Protection Commission fined TikTok €530 million for unlawfully transferring European user data to China without adequate safeguards, violating the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The investigation revealed that TikTok failed to ensure sufficient data protection measures once the data was transferred, posing significant risks under Chinese surveillance laws.
💰 European Commission's Breach with Microsoft 365: In March 2024, the European Data Protection Supervisor found that the European Commission's use of Microsoft 365 infringed several key data protection rules. The Commission failed to provide appropriate safeguards for personal data transferred outside the EU/EEA, leading to a suspension order on data flows resulting from its use of Microsoft 365 to countries not covered by an adequacy decision.
💰 British Airways' £20 Million Fine: British Airways faced a £20 million fine from the UK's Information Commissioner's Office after a 2018 data breach compromised the personal data of over 400,000 customers. The breach was attributed to poor security arrangements, including the storage of payment card details in plaintext and the use of outdated software, highlighting the airline's failure to protect customer data adequately.
The moral: HIPAA and GDPR compliance in the cloud isn’t automatic—and it certainly isn’t cheap. Keeping sensitive data on-premise, where access and residency are explicitly controlled, isn't just prudent—it might be the only defensible option when auditors come knocking.
7. On-Prem Is Easier to Predict and Debug
Multi-tenant clouds suffer from "noisy neighbors," surprise throttling, and vague incidents. With bare metal, what you provision is what you get.
A 2025 report by Azul Systems found that 83% of CIOs overspent on the cloud, and nearly half exceeded budgets by 25% or more. You can’t fix what you can’t measure, and cloud abstraction blinds even the best teams.
9. The Cloud Is Not Environmentally Holy
The cloud is sold as green, but hyperscale datacenters consume enormous power, often sourced from fossil fuels. Meanwhile, localized, efficient, low-power on-premise servers (especially ARM-based) can be far more sustainable in specific workloads.
10. Reclaiming Infrastructure Is Moral
Cloud Capital, a FinOps startup, recently raised $7.7M to combat what they estimate is a $344 billion/year overspending crisis in cloud infrastructure, projected to hit $1 trillion by 2030. Their business exists because the DevOps toolchain forgot to add a budget dashboard.
11. Only Rushed Software Farms Need DevOps Teams — And They're Expensive
Let’s be blunt: DevOps is not cheap. You're not just hiring engineers—you’re hiring toolchain babysitters, pipeline janitors, Kubernetes whisperers, and Slack war-room veterans. If your software team ships once a month — or doesn’t need to scale horizontally by Thursday — why mimic the deployment posture of a fintech unicorn?
Most businesses do not need that speed. They need uptime. They need audit trails. They need security. They do not need to pay $160K+ per year for someone to maintain Helm charts and debate YAML indentation style on GitHub.
DevOps, in reality, serves urgency. But not every team should live in a permanent state of urgency. If you ship carefully and predictably, you don’t need a DevOps team — you need discipline and a good sysadmin.
12. Everything Goes to Platforms
What once ran on a server now lives in a platform. Email? Google Workspace. Version control? GitHub. Monitoring? Datadog. Deployments? Vercel. CI/CD? GitLab, until it breaks, then you’re Googling “runners stuck in pending”. The industry is becoming a patchwork of black boxes with dashboards.
This isn't infrastructure — it’s dependency. You don’t maintain software anymore, you rent a slot in someone else’s stack. And every platform adds abstraction, latency, lock-in, and... another monthly invoice.
Try doing it your way and you're suddenly unsupported, incompatible, or “non-compliant”. There's no oxygen left for homegrown DevOps or pipelines-only “integrations”.
The industry has decided: DIY is dangerous. Everything must be managed, billed, monitored — as a service.
But this monoculture comes at a cost. You lose understanding. You lose flexibility. And eventually, you lose the ability to build outside of someone else’s rules. What was once craft is now just configuration.
On-prem systems, for all their grit, don’t hide from you. You know what it’s doing. You can tune it, fix it, or migrate it — without begging for API rate increases or watching a status page for two hours.
Everything is becoming a platform. But platforms are not freedom. They are permissioned productivity.
Epilogue: The Clouds Will Part
Cloud isn’t evil. But it isn’t holy either. It’s just another tool. The problem is cultural: we've confused speed with value, outsourcing with maturity, and complexity with progress.
It’s time to land. Touch the machines again. Grab data back.
Cover pic: "Piano" (Klavír), 'Pat and Mat' Czech animation series by 'Krátký film Praha' studio.
