Why Smart Companies Own Their Own Cloud – Insights from Software Defined Talk

Ever feel like your public cloud bill is just a hidden tax on your success? You’re not alone. What started as a simple journey has turned into a fight against vendor lock-in, out of control costs, and bills you need a certification to decipher.

On a recent episode of the Software Defined Talk podcast, “Yuriy Shyyan on Owning Your Own Cloud,” host Matt Ray sat down with OpenMetal’s Director of Cloud Systems Architecture, Yuriy Shyyan, to talk about why the most successful companies are moving to private infrastructure.

The Cloud Credit Trap and the 11,000-Line Bill

Yuriy, who’s got 15 years in the trenches of hosting and reliability, is a utilitarian. He sees inefficiency and wants to crush it. Right now, he says, public cloud margins are “fatter and fatter,” and they’re just not helping your bottom line.

• The Sticker Shock Is Intentional: The complexity from per-IOPS pricing to baffling egress charges is all by design. It creates a bill so long (“11,000 lines”) that you basically have to hire a new company just to figure out where your money is going.
• The Timeshare Pitch: Those “free cloud credits” aren’t a gift, they’re a bait-and-switch. They’re a conversion metric designed to get you locked into proprietary services like Lambda and RDS before you realize the true cost. As Yuriy says, it’s like “an invitation to a timeshare presentation”. Take the free weekend stay, but know they’re trying to sell you something expensive and non-negotiable.

The Billion-Dollar Secret: Own Your Stack

If the public cloud was the ultimate destination, the most successful companies would be there. They aren’t. They’ve figured out the big secret:

“If you’re a billion-dollar company, you should be running your own infrastructure.”

Companies like Walmart, Blizzard, and Volvo all run their own clouds, and many use OpenStack to do it. Why? Because they know control and cost predictability are their biggest competitive advantages. They’re not paying a premium for a service that’s constantly changing the rules on them. They’re not getting punished for their success.

And Yuriy emphasizes that none of this is magic. Beneath the marketing, many core cloud services are just simple, open source projects running in a virtual machine.

OpenMetal: Your Strategic Move to Freedom

OpenMetal makes it easy to follow the playbook of the biggest players without a multi-million-dollar CAPEX budget. We focus on giving you fixed-cost infrastructure so you can stop bleeding money and start innovating.

• Fixed Cost, Not Variable Pain: Stop dealing with unpredictable bills. You get a dedicated set of hardware and the costs are fixed and predictable.
• Zero Egress Fees: We don’t nickel-and-dime you for moving your own data. If your workload requires massive data transfers, you won’t be hit with a surprise bandwidth bill.
• The Power of Open Source: We use OpenStack and Ceph, massive, community-driven projects that give you flexibility and control. We focus on making the complex technology easy to use, and we even serve as an extension of your team, providing engineer-to-engineer communication to help you learn and get the most out of your environment.

Don’t let the public cloud continue to skim profits off your margins. The migration path is clear. It’s time to be smart and be strategic.

Want to hear more? Check out the full episode to hear Yuriy and Matt’s discussion including the cost of running your enterprise in the public cloud, high school hacking, building a business on OpenStack, and recognizing that cloud credits are an invitation to purchase a timeshare.