If You Had to Go Back On-Prem… #tsql2sday

For T-SQL Tuesday #199, Koen Verbeeck posed an excellent question: if your company moved up to the cloud, but after migrating, had to come back on-premises, what would be the big problems?

I’ve had clients in this exact situation! Here are some of my favorite gotchas from those experiences.

Buying hardware is really hard right now. AI companies have sucked up all of the available cheap hardware, and the remaining stuff is expensive, hard-to-get, and often delayed. You’re probably used to provisioning hardware in minutes – boy, are you gonna be in for a rough time if you need to get your hands on a bigger server, fast.

Calm outage troubleshooting may be a lost art. In the cloud, when there’s a major outage, you can shrug and point your fingers up at a giant vendor with a status page. On-prem, the executives are going to call you into a conference call and expect you to continue clearly communicating while simultaneously solving the problem. That’s a set of skills that a lot of us never had in the first place. The first major on-prem outage is a sad and eye-opening experience.

All it takes to stop the move is one dependency. If, after the migration TO the cloud, just one developer or sysadmin added a call to a cloud service that isn’t available on-prem, like a proprietary service from one cloud provider, you can be in a world of hurt. The entire migration back on-premises may hinge on finding a good self-hostable alternative to that service. It’s especially painful if the cloud vendor provides the service very inexpensively, but it’s very hard to maintain on your own.