What is ZIRP?

Probably it is a "Zero Interest Rate Policy"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_interest-rate_policy

Zero interest rate policies - cheap debt

Interest rates being near zero

It never really swings back the other way. It slows down adoption but we’ll never see large back-in-house IT projects. Because in-house offerings (and open-source) aren’t up to the task anymore.

It’s entirely possible that in-house offerings aren’t up to the task largely because the last 15 years have seen tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars invested in the idea that SAAS is cheaper and better?

Now that the VC subsidy is over, and we’re into the gouge all those billions back from the people you’ve hooked onto your drug phase of the adoption cycle, it’s entirely possible some investors and technologists might see an opportunity in helping companies break out of that situation.

So we may actually see some investment and effort in bringing in house tech up to par.

GPU and data storage costs are driving folks back on premise, maybe not to the same scale as before yet, but when you already need a colo for these services... Might as well bring back compute too.

Until very recently we were exclusively deploying on-prem and had been for over 20 years. The amount of tooling we had to write ourselves to get even a semblance of modern devops practices is insane. Absolutely no one supports the deployment methods and requirements we have, so it was either hacking existing things to do what we want, or writing our own stuff.

My team maintains our own Terraform providers, Ansible playbooks, bare metal management infra, CLI tooling, network automation, ITSM integration, on-prem Kubernetes running on metal in our own DCs, on-prem CI/CD, on-prem Gitlab, evolving IDP, etc.

SaaS, what SaaS?

I disagree, there are great offerings out there. Open stack has stagnated a bit as things have radically shifted to the cloud, but it's still a good scalable and supported option. VMware also can get you pretty far. You can also go hybrid, and have the elastic scalability of cloud with the low cost of on-prem. Products like OpenShift can make this seamless to developers, and easy to manage and maintain.

In-house IT isn't up to the task of building systems that are infinitely scalable but as the price goes up lots and lots of shops are going to realize they don't need infinitely scalable, they need the scale they're at and have no reason to want to grow it. In-house IT is great at that.

I feel like people also haven’t updated their mental models from 20 years ago about what a small server can do.

A Raspberry Pi 5 has more power than a huge NT back office server in the late 1990s or early 2000s.

The cloud hid 20 years of progress more or less. Things got more powerful but cloud prices didn’t come down at the same rate. Cloud providers pocketed the difference.

The void for on prem is mostly in the software. There just aren’t good management solutions or modern devops stacks for it. The hardware is way more than adequate. It’s also a lot more reliable than it used to be. Spinning disk is dead unless you are warehousing massive amounts of data.

On a lark a made a Ceph cluster a couple of years ago with a dozen RPis, a dozen commodity 1TB USB drives, and a SO/HO switch and... it worked. Like, it was a joke project one afternoon but suddenly we had a 3X redundant 4TB S3 pool that was faster than our WAN connection and just took switching out a HD or RPi once a quarter or so whenever Nagios lit up that one had failed.

Yep, but companies need to pay tens or hundreds of thousands a month for AWS to run it for them.

I feel like we are ripe for another turn of the on-prem/off-prem wheel.

Then, of course, once it's all back on-prem we will once again have price gouging monopolies (probably in software) and someone will have the bright idea of moving everything to... what will they call it next time? Maybe "the grid" instead of "the cloud?"

And what is the ratio of services that need to scale infinitely to those that do not? At least if you are for example in more traditional internal software development?

Almost none do. Internal software never does. External-facing software only does if the intended user base is "the world".

The "task" changes from time to time as well. Creating crazy new things, then figuring out they're too complex and then reinventing them simpler is another endless cycle, much older than software development itself.

Ahh but the big boy bare metal companies are catching up. Nutanix and the like can simplify on prem deployments and provide cloud-like experiences, though I admit nowhere nearly as polished yet.