Brave For Free

I mentioned in my previous post  that there are only five reasons to move to the cloud. Number one on that list is flexibility . (Image generated as usual by DALL-E-2) Everyone tells you the cloud will give us a lot of flexibility; that you can dance there in a way it cannot do on-premise (and not just because you’re a paunchy middle-aged man). Scale up, scale down, clone, snapshot, change your mind whenever you like, no long-term contracts, no fear of irrevocable errors — flexibility, what’s not to love? While you’re getting caught up in all the sexiness though, it is important to ask one key question. Why can’t your elephants dance? (By this, I mean to ask, of course, why your on-premise is not flexible -no actual elephants are involved) It’s not a trivial question. For a while now, most enterprises have virtualised infrastructure not very dissimilar from the cloud, and hence many of the technological barriers to flexibility (attached storage disks, physical servers etc) have long si