London Cloud Leaders #13 – The On-Premises Leader’s Playbook: Scaling Infrastructure in the Age of AI

The cloud was supposed to solve everything, and for many it got close. But for many other organisations, on-prem infrastructure is very much still the reality and working well. That said, it’s under more pressure than ever.

Server costs have skyrocketed. Hardware supply chains are strained. And all of this while AI workloads are spinning up demand that can increase tenfold overnight with no elastic capacity to absorb it.

Unlike the cloud, you can’t just provision your way out of a problem. You plan months ahead, commit to hardware with long lead times, and then live with the consequences when demand doesn’t match the forecast. This is even worse when GenAI firms have bought all the world’s RAM.

This roundtable brings together senior cloud and infrastructure leaders to share honest strategies for navigating the on-premise squeeze.

We’ll talk:

• Kubernetes capacity planning

• Managing runaway hardware costs.

• Evaluating the real dilemma of using cloud where it makes sense

• Virtualisation strategies

• Security Management

• Managing pushback from developers expecting a cloud environment

The session opens with a candid 10-minute account of Brittany’s journey from on-premises to public cloud and back again, before opening into a peer-led discussion on real challenges with managing on-prem workloads.

Agenda

• 5:30pm to 6:00pm – Arrival and networking

• 6:00pm to 6:15pm – Introductions

• 6:15pm to 7:00pm – Session part one

• 7:00pm to 7:10pm – Break

• 7:10pm to 7:45pm – Session part two and discussion

• 7:45pm to 8:30pm – Networking and wrap-up