 All right, Chris has a question. I have a company looking to move to the cloud or at least considering it. Right now they have quite a bit of on-prem hardware but are upsizing within the next year or so, likely. Our IT guy says it's cheaper to not be on cloud and gave examples of equivalent server hardware costs and breakdowns compared to our on-premises solution. What? On-premises. That's why I was modifying to our on-premises solution. On-premises is like on the point, on the premise of the discussion. No, on-premises is the location. It's not a real word, it's not a real word. It is, it's a literary statement. Yeah, it has nothing to do with your data warehouse. So on-premises solution, let me just read that sentence over. Our IT guy says it's cheaper to not be on cloud and gave examples of equivalent server hardware costs and breakdowns compared to our on-premises solution where a lot of it has already been sorted out. I generally agree with his assessment when looking at a lift and shift process but I would like to know how others would approach it as a general shift to microservices is also happening meaning low tier used application may be better off as compute items. Also several machines may not be needed 24 seven since they would be internal company owner. What is the best way other can think of to come to a pricing evaluation? What metrics do I need? I don't have metrics of compute on individual applications so can't say that it would be cheaper. It's all broken down into separate apps. Also unclear about Azure hybrid benefit and how that might play into things. I know this is a lot. I realize that there's a lot to cover here of several edge cases, but looking for a general approach. Chris clearly is factoring in his own costs, what it costs to employ him. But yeah, I mean, it's hard to argue with the economics of the cloud these days. It's oftentimes when you think about it in terms of basic commodities, you're trying to compare costs. You have to factor in not only the cost of hardware which Chris was doing, but the cost of any sort of redundancy, the cost of the workforce to maintain it, any sort of office space, place to put this stuff, that all factors into it. So it's not very clear where things stop, but economics are clearly pointing towards the cloud for many workloads and services. Many organizations want that stuff as a service. And the thing is it's mostly a mind shift. You've got to get to the point where you accept it as a service rather than somebody you can go walk down the hall to and yell at because the server's not working, that sort of thing. And I worked for an organization where they said, hey, we want to basically set ourselves up as a shared services, truly a shared services organization, and separated themselves from the other business units so that they were actually, or I should say we, I was there, where we knew our floor space and we were paying back to the company for the space that we had people in. And so we looked at every time we were engaged with and the SLAs that we maintained around it. There was a cost so that we would charge back. So it was this charge back model, not that it's ideal. And there are a lot of problems with that. It's one company, and so it was a strategy, a way of looking at those costs and truly understanding the implications of the cost. It was one of those things, it's like marketing dollars, where you could just pour money into on services internally and it's all funny money, because it's internal. And we don't really understand the costs of what we're asking for. And it was a way to drive responsibility back to those requests. And so it's few organizations are set up to go and look at it with that deep of an analysis to understand the cost breakdown, project management around it, use of all the ticketing to support personnel up to the product teams, all of that stuff, that running it like it's a startup and from the ideation all the way through delivery and support of those different pieces. But there's other pieces that are part of this process. And not enough, we all get excited about new technology. And we often forget that, hey, we made these upfront investments, those on-prem investments, we've not yet carried that through until it's paid for itself. Therefore we're not gonna talk about moving until we've gotten the value out of what was, until the cost of remaining is greater than the cost to move. And again, a lot of companies don't really know, they don't look at it close enough to understand where that trade off, where that switch should happen. I don't think that, and there's a lot to unpack in this because there's a, you know, this question, there's multiple questions here, right? But I break it down into a couple of different things. The first thing is resources. Moving to the cloud really doesn't change your resources. Now, obviously you're still gonna have on-premises equipment, there's still gonna be something there. The operational cost, you're talking about the long-going cost, right? Correct, yeah, I'm going operational costs, those really don't change that much, okay? When overall, when you look at the overall budgeting and everything, it really doesn't change that much. But what does change is number one, the cultural fit because, you know, folks are used to having things on-premises, they're used to being able to touch things, be able to do whatever they need to do on a moment's notice, go down to the data center, unplug something, plug something in. Now they have to do it virtually. They have to, you know, figure out their network and their applications and where they're being served from and how things are being done. If they run it on their own computer, they run it as a SaaS service, they run it as a past service, what have you. Expectations managed, yeah. Excuse me, yeah. And when someone comes along, I get this a lot as people come along and they say it's really expensive to go to the cloud. I mean, they say, oh yeah, excuse me, we have a new CEO and he came in and he wants everybody, everything to go to the cloud. And I'm Mr. IT person and I'm saying it's just, he doesn't realize how expensive it's gonna be. Well, it's only expensive, it's relatively expensive. And the reason why I say that is because a lot of business units just wanna be able to do what they need to do with the apps that they know they can use or the apps that they're given. Most of the time they don't know whether it's running on-premises or in a cloud as a SaaS service as a past service. They don't care. And that's exactly it. They really don't care from an IT perspective. Yeah, they kind of care because they have to police it and manage it and monitor it and alert on it and all that other kind of stuff. But that's where you start getting those shadow ITs like you mentioned, Christian, where it's like, hey, finance goes off and books its own SaaS service, IT doesn't even know about it, doesn't know anything about it. And then finally a bill comes through and IT's like, what's this? And finance is, oh yeah, we didn't wanna wait for you guys. We just went off and did our own thing and we've got our own provider. You guys don't need to worry about it. So you run into that as well. But I really take issue with the folks that come off and just say, bottom line is too expensive. That's not really true. You need to look at it deeper than that. You need to look at everything from a holistic point of view and not just isolating that, oh yeah, you know what, these egress transfers that come from Azure, you know, all this data that we're pulling down into our policy system or into our ERP system or whatever is costing a fortune. Well, what's the remedy for that? What's a solution for that? You're obviously not, you don't have a very good solution if you're causing that much cost. It's no different than if you had it on premises between two data centers. You're still paying for the cost of moving that data because you have to pay for that linkage. You know, you have to pay, you know, you're still paying for that. So it's a matter of people aren't, they're not framing their minds around it because I think that the industry itself did a really, really bad job of marketing the cloud when it first came out. And they were like, this will fix everything. This is wonderland. Isn't this the correction kind of where you had the, then it became about digital transformation and like that, you know, was another way of, it's still cloud consolidation. It's still moving to the cloud. It's, you know, it's, you know, Microsoft internally, they talked about with partners. It's about dark accounts. So those that are still on a pround, they're in the dark and moving them to the light and moving across. But, you know, the mistake that was made early on, I remember, and Sean and I both experienced this extensively was like when companies would say, hey, I'm running SharePoint on-prem. I'll take what I built and I'll lift and shift. And Chris talks about this in his question, lift and shift and move that across. Well, of course that's going to be more expensive to move that across. Cause it's not architected in whatever automations, whatever customizations that were made there and it run within your Azure environment or some other cloud like, yeah, but it's going to be a whole lot more expensive than it would be if you went in and said, what do we actually need to move? What are we actually trying to do? What has changed about from on-prem moving to the cloud? Where is it more efficient? Where are there new features and capabilities? So re-architecting, redesigning those things. So I would argue that, cause moving data is easy and cheap by comparison. And really it's just a matter of, okay, what needs to move across? What other complexity do we have to move across? So part of any migration effort is to go in and do an assessment first. Lift and shift has never worked, not worked well for anyone. Unless it's like a database, a database that is moving across and it's just, it's dumb. It's not, there's no intelligence around it. That kind of migration. Everything else is more complex than that. So it's really going in and assessing what do we have in place, what makes sense, and then iterating on that migration over the cloud. And some things you're leaving behind, other things you're optimizing, some things may come straight across. But that's what that digital transformation, planning that effort around it, and I'll be the first to say it, puts it into the category of, well, it depends. What do you actually try to move across? I hate to be the first one to use the phrase, but it really does depend on what you're moving across, what those costs could be. Sometimes it's dramatically cheaper to move to the cloud. Other times, it may be business critical and very expensive to move over. Which is why a lot of companies have opted to remain in a hybrid mode because of those costs, until they get through their investments and those highly customized, personalized, automated solutions, until it makes financial sense to move it purely in the cloud, they will remain in hybrid. And there's even in maintaining hybrid, there's some additional costs of maintaining these multiple systems. But you know what? Putting both worlds, yeah. Right, you know what? There's a lot of those overhead costs which you weren't accurately capturing and tracking anywhere. Well, and they didn't need to, right? So they're coming back going, well, we didn't, you know, these costs are coming out of nowhere. Well, not really. The costs were there. You just weren't tracking them. You just weren't consuming them the same way you have to now. That brings up two points. Number one, what you said around, you know, having the hybrid environment. Is it less expensive to have a DR solution where you're paying for two physical sites or a shared site and you have equipment at the other site and things like that? Or is it more cost effective to use the cloud where you can, you know, expand and contract as needed scale, you know? And if you have a disaster event, you can scale up and just, you know, bring everything to fruition whether, you know, a secondary site, you're gonna have boots on the ground trying to, you know, rack equipment and trying to get stuff in there and do all that. You know, you gotta take that, you know, into consideration. But to getting on the financial side, I didn't know this, but a couple of years ago, I actually sat through a couple of webinars for folks that gave talks about FinOps, you know, financial operations. FinOps is a big thing now because the financial folks didn't know how to pay the cloud bill. They don't know how to pay the cloud bill. They're waiting, they're expecting one bill to come through and it's gonna be put on somebody's credit card or it's gonna be paid by, you know, a check. That's not how the cloud works, you know? They have to, you know, breaking out who owns what and what resources are be used by what departments and, you know, these VMs are used for this department. Those are for another. These Azure functions are used by this and this storage is used by these people and these people and these people. So who pays for all of it? You know, that is a big thing with the finance folks is they don't know how to pay the bill. So it's not just IT that's affected by this. You know, it's the business folks and the financial folks as well. Itemized building, building. Yeah, yeah, that doesn't help. That really doesn't help, but I wanna address here the last question he had. I'm clear about Azure Hybrid Benefit and how that might play into things. All Hybrid Benefit does is it gives you a discount. It basically says if you own the license for on-prem, you own the license in Azure, right? And it allows you to use that license instead of having to pay a full license cost in Azure. That's all Hybrid Use Benefit does, okay? And everybody checks the box, whether they own a license or not, not like Microsoft really checks, okay? To be honest with you. Now you've said it out loud and now they're gonna start checking. Well, the guys are gonna show up in the button downs and the ties and start auditing you. But that was a big concern early on was like, hey, am I gonna have to pay for licenses in two places? So it makes sense that Microsoft would come out and say, no, I mean, they don't want to discourage people for making that move. It's like, you own it, it's just in different markets. Do you remember when Azure had the Hybrid Use and they were like, oh, you get it for free then with this cost because everybody already in IT would be like, oh yeah, you buy this app, but you gotta pay for the server license. And the server license was like $2,500 or whatever for an enterprise, you know? But then AWS couldn't do that because Microsoft wouldn't give them the licensing. So if you had AWS, you had to pay for those Windows server licenses and Microsoft was like, yeah, that's gonna bring more people over to us, right? Well, we know how well that worked out. Did you know that actually, and I just found this out, did you know that their percentage now is 72% or 72 or 76? I can't remember the number exactly. A lot of servers used in Azure are Linux. Wow. No, I didn't know that. Yeah, they're over 70% now. Wow. Yeah.