Dana CazacuDiscover why DIY cloud deployments often fail and how Atmosphere simplifies cloud management with expert support, automation, and scalability.
Many organisations are drawn to the DIY (Do-It-Yourself) model when it comes to building and operating their own cloud infrastructure. The appeal is understandable: full control, avoiding third-party vendor fees, and tapping into in-house expertise. You build it, you manage it, you customise it.
But the reality is far messier. What starts out as a cost-savvy move often turns into an uphill battle. Hidden costs creep in, staffing demands grow, operations become inefficient, resources get mis-managed, and unexpected downtime or performance problems start eating into budgets and productivity. The very goals of control, customisation and cost-efficiency get undermined. In fact, 78% of companies estimate that 21-50% of their cloud expenditure is wasted annually.
That’s where Atmosphere an OpenStack distro comes in as a game-changer. Built to simplify cloud management, Atmosphere gives you a unified, scalable, efficient and open-source solution that sidesteps the DIY traps. With strong automation, dynamic resource allocation and expert-backed support, and no vendor lock-in, Atmosphere lets you focus on innovation and growth instead of the nuts and bolts of cloud ops.
§ The Appeal of DIY Cloud Deployments
Perceived Cost Savings
One of the biggest draws of DIY cloud deployments is the belief in cost savings. By avoiding external service providers, businesses assume they can significantly reduce expenses. Additionally, many organizations believe their in-house teams have the expertise and resources needed to handle the deployment effectively, further reinforcing the perception of savings.
Complete Control
DIY deployments offer the allure of full control over the cloud environment. Businesses can build a fully customizable infrastructure tailored to their specific needs, ensuring it aligns perfectly with their operational goals. This freedom also extends to selecting preferred tools, software, and configurations, giving organizations the flexibility to create a solution that works best for them.
Learning Opportunity
For IT teams, DIY deployments are often seen as an opportunity to gain hands-on experience and deepen their expertise in cloud technologies like OpenStack and Kubernetes. By tackling the complexities of deployment and management, teams aim to build internal capabilities that could benefit the organization in the long term.
§ The Hidden Costs of DIY Cloud Deployments
DIY cloud environments often appear affordable at first, but many of the most significant expenses only become clear once teams begin building and maintaining the infrastructure themselves. These hidden costs can quickly outweigh any initial savings.
Staffing Requirements
Running a cloud environment in house requires highly skilled engineers with deep knowledge of OpenStack, Kubernetes, networking, storage, and automation.
This type of talent is difficult to find and expensive to retain. The workload placed on these teams is also demanding. Frequent troubleshooting, configuration work, and daily maintenance often create a constant cycle of pressure that leads to fatigue and burnout.
Time and Complexity
Even strong technical teams face unexpected delays when taking on DIY deployments. Planning, integration work, and problem solving all require more time than anticipated.
Without automated systems and standardized tools, routine tasks such as scaling, updating, or maintaining clusters become slow manual processes that pull attention away from strategic projects.
Operational Inefficiencies
DIY environments are highly susceptible to resource mismanagement. Teams often overprovision to avoid risk or underutilize resources due to limited oversight, which drives costs higher over time. 49% of businesses find it hard to keep cloud costs under control, and 33% of businesses overrun their cloud budget by 40%.
Gaps in monitoring or configuration can increase the likelihood of outages, and even brief downtime can disrupt applications, create revenue loss, and impact customer experience.
Long Term Costs
As DIY cloud environments mature, the operational weight grows heavier. Teams must continually manage patches, upgrades, security updates, and compatibility issues, all of which require time and expertise.
When internal skills are not enough, organizations frequently turn to paid external support, which often removes any financial advantage they hoped to gain by operating the cloud on their own.
§ Why DIY Deployments Often Fail
Deploying and maintaining cloud environments built on technologies like OpenStack and Kubernetes demands deep, specialized expertise. While Day-0 (initial deployment) and Day-1 (basic configuration and setup) operations are often manageable, it’s Day-2 operations (ongoing maintenance, optimization, and troubleshooting) that pose the greatest challenges. Many internal teams simply don’t have the experience required to configure, tune, and operate these systems at production scale. Even small mistakes during setup or upgrades can snowball into downtime, degraded performance, or critical failures that disrupt the entire business.
Scaling becomes another major challenge in DIY environments. Without mature orchestration tools or automated resource management, organizations often struggle to keep up with changing demand. During peak periods, limited capacity leads to bottlenecks and poor user experience, while quieter periods leave expensive hardware sitting idle. The result is a cycle of inefficiency, frustration, and increased operational costs.
Security and compliance introduce an additional layer of complexity. When cloud environments are managed manually or without automated safeguards, misconfigurations become far more likely, and each one represents a potential vulnerability. Missing patches, outdated components, or incomplete access controls can expose systems to real threats. At the same time, failing to meet industry compliance requirements risks financial penalties and long-term damage to the organization’s reputation.
Finally, DIY deployments tend to fall short when it comes to visibility. Without sophisticated monitoring and analytics, teams have little insight into how resources are used across tenants or workloads. This lack of clarity makes it difficult to optimize performance, eliminate waste, or forecast future capacity needs. Over time, these blind spots translate into preventable costs and operational inefficiencies that limit the cloud’s overall value.
§ How Atmosphere Solves These Challenges
Expert-Led Deployment, Backed by Real OpenStack Leadership
Atmosphere removes the complexity of cloud operations by giving organizations direct access to seasoned experts from the team behind VEXXHOST. Our engineers have contributed upstream to OpenStack since the Baxter release, and our team members have served as project team leads for various projects. That means deployments, upgrades, and lifecycle operations aren’t just supported, they’re guided by people who help shape the technology itself.
Elastic, Kubernetes-Powered Resource Scaling
Atmosphere uses Kubernetes orchestration alongside OpenStack-Helm to deliver seamless scaling across compute, storage, and networking. Workloads grow and shrink automatically based on demand, eliminating performance bottlenecks during peak times and cutting unnecessary spending during slower periods. This dynamic approach ensures resources are always used efficiently without manual intervention.
If you want to learn more abouthow Atmosphere orchestrates Kubernetes and OpenStack for scalable infrastructure we highly recommend reading this blog post.
Deep Visibility Through Our Monitoring Stack
Stratometrics, Atmosphere’s integrated analytics platform, provides detailed billing usage insights, making it a valuable tool for managing resource consumption in public cloud offerings. However, for monitoring and operational observability in Atmosphere, the platform leverages a robust monitoring stack built on Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, and Alertmanager. This stack ensures real-time visibility into system health, alerting, and performance metrics, enabling teams to monitor workloads, identify potential issues, and respond proactively. Together, these tools create a comprehensive solution for optimizing both cost and performance in cloud environments.
If you want to learn more about how Atmosphere expands Openstack monitoring, we highly recommend you read this blog post.
Built-In Security and Compliance
Atmosphere prioritizes security and compliance through integrated identity management, data encryption, and proactive monitoring. With support for protocols like LDAP, SAML, and OpenID Connect, Atmosphere ensures secure access control and compliance with evolving regulatory requirements.
Automation for Efficiency
Manual tasks like patching, scaling, and system updates can be time-consuming and error-prone. Atmosphere eliminates these challenges with advanced automation, streamlining routine operations and significantly reducing the risk of human error.
Upgrades, often a complex and risky process in traditional environments, are made seamless with Atmosphere’s automated workflows. These workflows ensure that updates are applied efficiently and with minimal downtime, allowing organizations to stay current with the latest features and security patches without disrupting operations. By automating these critical processes, Atmosphere empowers teams to focus on innovation rather than maintenance.
With its combination of expert-backed support, dynamic scaling, advanced insights, robust security, and automation, Atmosphere addresses the key challenges of DIY cloud deployments. It provides businesses with a reliable and efficient solution, enabling them to focus on growth and innovation rather than the complexities of cloud management.
Conclusion
While DIY cloud deployments may seem cost-effective at first, the hidden challenges and long-term costs often outweigh the initial savings. From staffing shortages and operational inefficiencies to scaling issues and security risks, the DIY model can quickly become unsustainable. Atmosphere offers a smarter alternative, providing expert-backed support, dynamic scaling, advanced usage insights, and robust automation to eliminate these challenges. With Atmosphere, businesses can focus on growth, innovation, and achieving their goals without being bogged down by cloud management complexities.
If you’d like to bring Atmosphere into your organization with the help of our team of experts, reach out to our sales team today!