Moving to an alt cloud
Coinerella’s experience mirrors what many enterprises are learning as they move toward alt clouds, including sovereign clouds, private clouds, and other non-default platforms. The biggest lesson is that the economics of the move can be attractive precisely because you’re taking on more work. Lower infrastructure costs are real, but they come with increased integration responsibility, more platform engineering, and a higher need for operational maturity.
This is also where the “want versus need” conversation becomes unavoidable. Hyperscalers have trained teams to select managed services the way you pick items off a menu, often because it’s convenient, fast, and politically easy. Alt cloud strategies force prioritization. You may want the newest managed feature set, the deepest marketplace, and the broadest ecosystem, but you may not need them to meet your business outcomes. When you choose sovereignty or a private-cloud footing, you often end up selecting simpler technologies that meet requirements, even if they’re less glamorous or less feature-rich. This is not a retreat. It’s a form of architectural discipline.
However, none of this works without adding new practices. Finops becomes an engineering discipline that spans heterogeneous providers, self-hosted platforms, and capacity planning decisions you can no longer punt to a hyperscaler. Observability becomes a first-class design requirement because you’re building a platform that crosses boundaries and includes components you own end to end. You need consistent metrics, logs, traces, service-level objectives, and incident response procedures that work even when tools and APIs differ across providers. Because you’re doing more of the work, you need to be more explicit about patching, security, backups, recovery testing, and operational runbooks.
