Over the past decade, the explosive revenue growth of the “big three” public cloud providers—AWS, Azure, and GCP—has fundamentally reshaped the tech landscape. For example, AWS’s revenue soared from $3.1 billion in 2013 to an estimated $108 billion in 2024. This meteoric rise underscores the widespread adoption of cloud technologies, driven by the promise of:
Cost Efficiency
The potential to reduce capital expenditures and alleviate operational burdens tied to managing on-premises infrastructure are often touted.
Scalability
The ability to dynamically scale resources based on demand is a hallmark of the cloud, especially valuable for workloads with variable demand.
Agility
An on-demand consumption model allows businesses to deploy and scale applications rapidly, bypassing the delays of traditional IT processes.
However, after years of experience using public cloud platforms, organizations have come to a few realizations. High cost and cost predictability has emerged as a major pain point, with some enterprises repatriating workloads back to on-premises due to skyrocketing cloud bills. Similarly, scalability, while valuable, is often underutilized by enterprise workloads with predictable resource demands. Ultimately, the true value of the cloud lies in enabling agility and innovation, but these benefits are not exclusive to public cloud platforms as discussed below.
The Cloud as an Operating Model
So, what does “cloud” truly mean? A common misconception is to treat the cloud as a destination synonymous with the public cloud. In reality, the cloud is an operating model—a framework designed to deliver automation, efficiency, and scalability across environments, whether public cloud, on-premises, or the edge.
Challenges of Traditional On-Premises Infrastructure
Modern on-premises environments can support diverse use cases such as private clouds, bare metal-as-a-service, edge computing, and GPU-intensive workloads. However, traditional on-premises operations have struggled to match the efficiency and agility of public cloud platforms. The core issue lies not in scale but in outdated and fragmented operational practices, such as:
Siloed Operations
Teams responsible for networking, servers, storage, and security frequently work in isolation, relying on manual processes and ticketing systems that create bottlenecks and slow down workflows.
Infrastructure Complexity
On-premises environments frequently consist of heterogeneous hardware from multiple vendors and different generations, leading to increased management overhead and operational complexity.
Tool Sprawl
Managing this complexity often requires a patchwork of 10 to 15 tools, spanning in-house, commercial, and open-source solutions, which reduces visibility and adds cost.
These challenges are compounded by a shortage of skilled professionals capable of managing modern on-prem infrastructure, leaving organizations ill-equipped to achieve the agility and efficiency offered by public cloud platforms.
Closing the Gap
Overcoming these inefficiencies demands a modernized approach that integrates automation, orchestration, and streamlined processes to deliver cloud-like simplicity and performance to on-premises infrastructure.
A strategy gaining some traction, especially espoused by Gartner, is infrastructure platform engineering. Infrastructure platform engineering applies platform engineering principles to infrastructure management, consolidating traditionally siloed functions—networking, servers, storage, and security—into a unified team. This team delivers infrastructure as a product through self-service portals and APIs, eliminating bottlenecks, standardizing processes, and accelerating delivery.
Though great in theory, in practice it often falls short in the delivery. Teams often struggle to break down silos of specialists, or generalists lack the depth of expertise needed for complex tasks. The key to success is not just reorganizing teams but adopting the right orchestration platform.
A full-stack, integrated orchestration platform can eliminate inefficiencies by abstracting and unifying the management of servers, storage, and networks. This is the philosophy behind the MetalSoft platform and can deliver significant benefits:
Hyperscaler-like Efficiency
Fully automating infrastructure provisioning and management can reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) for on-prem environments by 60–70% compared to public cloud alternatives.
Enhanced Agility
On-prem environments can replicate public cloud capabilities, offering self-service provisioning, on-demand scalability, and CI/CD-enabled automation.
Striking the Right Balance
Public cloud platforms are ideal for unpredictable or spiky workloads, but many enterprise workloads are rather steady or slowly changing. Running these workloads on-premises not only reduces costs but also provides greater control and reduces dependency on third-party providers.
The goal is not an all-or-nothing approach. Instead, a hybrid model that leverages the best of both public cloud and on-prem solutions allows organizations to optimize costs, agility, and control. Enterprises that strike this balance will be well-positioned to drive innovation and growth in the years to come.