PlayStation Network’s voice chat service was originally operated entirely on public cloud infrastructure. One of the motivations for moving toward a hybrid model that incorporates on-premises infrastructure was to better understand potential cost advantages. In the current hybrid setup, baseline traffic is handled on-premises, while burst traffic is offloaded to the public cloud. As a first step, we needed to make on-premises costs visible with a level of transparency closer to what is typically available in public cloud environments. This required rethinking how cost data is collected, structured, and interpreted for on-premises systems, where financial models, tooling, and assumptions differ significantly from the cloud.
In this lightning talk, we will share why we started this journey, what we have been able to achieve so far, and the challenges we encountered along the way. We will focus on the practical hurdles of making on-premises costs visible, the gaps we identified, and the lessons learned from applying a FinOps mindset beyond a single public cloud environment.