Invitation from Koen Verbeeck
This month’s topic is moving back to on-premises environments from the cloud.
I was intrigued by this blog post from Alexander Arvidsson (blog - bluesky - linkedin): The Whiplash Effect – The Skills We Forgot We’d Need. He talks about the fact that more and more clients are considering moving back to on-prem. Or at least consider it an option when brainstorming architectures. There might be many reasons for this (and it might be a Europe thing, who knows), such as cost, performance or political climate. Alexander then poses the questions: do we still have the skills to create an infrastructure and data platform on-premises? Haven’t we lost too many skills after a decade of cloud computing? When was the last time you had to deal with a slow SAN? (it’s always storage. And if it isn’t, it’s DNS) Or had to set up Kerberos? Or had to deal with file paths that were too long for Windows to handle?
So, dear reader, I want you to think about what would happen if suddenly your company or your client asks to build everything on-prem again (or maybe a hybrid architecture). Possible angles can be:
- what skill do you think you would have to learn again?
- or, maybe you are still on-prem, you never left for the cloud, but what do you think that people would struggle with?
- do you have some war stories about on-prem, something that the script kiddies of today wouldn’t understand?
- if you had to train a junior to work on-prem, what would be your best advice?