RTO, Return To On-premise

How we got there

The advantage of moving to the cloud was always clear: no big CAPEX, just a monthly fee and someone else will provide the compute, the network and everything else. As CTOs began to propose “lift and shift” strategies with an almost Pavlovian response, cloud adoption became the default setting, turning into a buzzword that eventually numbed us. We forgot that, at the end of the day, we were simply running our businesses on someone else's computer.

Agency & Fate Sharing

This numbness is usually interrupted when the “shared” nature of that computer becomes painfully obvious. In 2017, a single bug in a Cloudflare HTML parser leaked the private memory of thousands of unrelated companies into public search engine caches. But if that was a warning regarding privacy, the recent outage was a definitive lesson on availability. When a firewall adjustment intended to mitigate a vulnerability in the React framework was deployed, half of the internet went down because of another parser bug. Why should my shop go down because someone else is using React? There is nothing that any technical leader could have done to prevent that. And don't get me started about the guarantee that your customer data is going to be leaked (but you can blame someone else, right?)

What Changed?

In a centralized model, you trade the hassle of hardware for the risk of a blast radius that you cannot control. Luckily, the landscape has fundamentally changed since the early days of cloud migration. Today, technologies like Kubernetes, Terraform and declarative provisioning principles allow us to treat physical racks exactly like cloud regions. We are no longer managing servers; we are managing manifests. This shift allows us to pack a fully automated, self-healing cloud cluster into an on-premise environment that remains virtually untouched by human hands, controlled entirely by the same gitops workflows used by the big guys.

We finally have the technical maturity to reject the awkwardness of opening our digital shops in the house of our biggest competitor, as is the case with AWS and e-commerce.

RTO (Return to On-premise) is a little bit about nostalgia for server racks, but mostly it is about the ability to claim the right to go down because I fucked up.