Let's Not Talk About Repatriation: Rich Hoyer of SADA on FinOps and Workload Balancing

In early 2021, Rich Hoyer, Director of Customer FinOps for SADA, published an opinion piece in VentureBeat that refuted the findings of an earlier published article about the cost of hosting workloads in the cloud. In his rebuttal, Hoyer called the article (which was written by representatives of Andreessen Horowitz Capital Management) "dead wrong" with regard to its findings about cloud repatriation and costs.

Hoyer's expertise and his views on doing business in the cloud make him an ideal participant for a C2C Global panel discussion taking place on January 20, at which he will appear alongside representatives of Twitter and Etsy to talk about whether or not enterprises should consider moving workloads off the cloud and into data centers. Hoyer predicts the panel conversation will lean away from the concept of repatriation and more toward the concept of balancing workloads.

"I don't think repatriation is the right term," Hoyer says. "To me, it's much more a decision of what workloads should be where, so I would phrase it as rebalancing - as more optimally balancing. Repatriation implies that there's this lifecycle. That's just not the way it works. How many startups have workloads that are architected from the ground up and not cloud native? You don't see that. If you're cloud native, you start using the stuff as cloud native." 

The panel discussion will focus on hybrid workloads, he says, with a specific eye toward what works from a cost standpoint for each individual customer. 

"We want cloud consumers to be successful, and if they have stuff in the cloud that ought not to be there, they're going to be unhappy with those workloads," Hoyer says. "That's not good for us, it's not good for Google, it's not good for anybody. We want only things in the cloud that are going to be successful because customers know they're getting value from it, because that's what's going to cause them to expand and grow in the cloud."

From his FinOps viewpoint, Hoyer says he will be advocating for the process of making decisions around managing spend in public cloud, and the disciplines around making decisions in the cloud. 

"The whole process of trying to get control of this begins with the idea of visibility into what the spend is, and that means you have to have an understanding of how to report against it, how to apply the tooling to do things like anomaly alerting," he says. I expect the discussion to be less about whether there should be repatriation, and the more constructive discussion to be about the ways to think about how to keep the balance right."  

The overall goal of the panel is to present a process for analyzing workloads. And according to Hoyer, that's not a one-time process - it's iterative. 

"I'll encourage anyone who has hybrid scenarios - some in the data center and some in the cloud - to be doing iterated looks at that to see what workloads should still be in the cloud," Hoyer says. "There should be an iteration: Here's what's in the cloud today, here's what's in the data center today, and in broad terms, are these the right workloads? And then also, when stuff is in the cloud, are we operating it efficiently? And that's a constant process, because you'll have workloads that grow from the size they were in the cloud. And we'll hear that same evaluation from the technology standpoint - are we using the best products in the cloud, and are there things in the data center that ought not to be there?"