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There's outsourcing and there's outsourcing. There may be fewer companies trying to build internal applications using contractors on another continent, but it

by tsotha 11y ago

There's outsourcing and there's outsourcing. There may be fewer companies trying to build internal applications using contractors on another continent, but it seems like more companies are getting rid of data center operations in favor of services like AWS.

jrs235 11y ago
> more companies are getting rid of data center operations in favor of services like AWS. That's not really outsourcing. That's shifting from capital expenses to operating expenses which has tax and cash flow advantages.
- stephenr 11y ago
  Smaller companies doing this (and possibly some big ones) are essentially outsourcing "Ops" by using "cloud" providers. The number of people that think somehow using AWS means you no longer need Ops staff is amazing. In a bad way. How often does "we can't afford our own Ops so we use AWS/Azure/etc" come up as a reason to accept the associated vendor lock in with a given provider?
  - grogenaut 11y ago
    there are ops and there are ops... are you speaking to ops regarding managing the hardware itself, or ops re the applications you are running on the hardware? Cloud definitely doesn't remove the latter. Unless your company runs on just a database with no app code.
    - stephenr 11y ago
      > Cloud definitely doesn't remove the latter. Many would disagree with you, and run their business as if that is the case. I'm not saying they are right, I'm saying thats the reality of how a number of decision makers act.
  - devonkim 11y ago
    It depends upon what you use your ops staff for that can mean different things and how you're structured across a service lifecycle. For example, WhatsApp had no operations engineers that were dedicated - everyone was an operations engineer that was writing the software by helping keep it alive. This to me is the intent for the devops organizational style - your developers have full visibility and responsibility into seeing their code through the entire cycle of existence and can quickly fix and prevent problems better than split teams. While most software developers tend to be terrible operations engineers and vice versa, I'm quite sure that well-written software makes operations work far, far easier and thus makes O&S much cheaper as a result. Also, a lot of companies opt to use Heroku first then migrate to basic ol' AWS once that gets far too expensive for them and may hire an operations engineer or two to replace the cost and to help them scale better with capital. NoOps in a very literal sense being used to describe tech operations is something I never think I'll see anyone take seriously and that can scale.
- mseebach 11y ago
  Actually, that's exactly what outsourcing is. You buy a well-known commodity service off the shelf from a provider that has the scale to maintain real expertise and reap significant economies of scale. It's been done that way for physical products forever (you never see a company with an in-house carpentry shop making it's own office furniture). It's the "replace an in-house team with a broadly equivalent external team" version of outsourcing of recent years that's the bastard.
- jasode 11y ago
  >That's not really outsourcing. That's shifting from capital expenses to operating expenses The "capital (depreciation) vs operating" is only talking about hardware. Having in-house IT employees to install new servers, run new cabling, change tapes for backups, etc, is not a capital expense. Migrating to AWS can shift the FTEs from XYZ company's payroll to Amazon's payroll. Presumably, Amazon's engineers can do IT admin operations in a more cost-efficient manner. That's "outsourcing." Yes, there would still be in-house employees as "AWS admins" but overall, there should be a net-reduction of FTEs doing commodity-IT grunt work.

by tsotha 11y ago

jrs235 11y ago

> more companies are getting rid of data center operations in favor of services like AWS. That's not really outsourcing. That's shifting from capital expenses to operating expenses which has tax and cash flow advantages.

stephenr 11y ago
Smaller companies doing this (and possibly some big ones) are essentially outsourcing "Ops" by using "cloud" providers. The number of people that think somehow using AWS means you no longer need Ops staff is amazing. In a bad way. How often does "we can't afford our own Ops so we use AWS/Azure/etc" come up as a reason to accept the associated vendor lock in with a given provider?
- grogenaut 11y ago
  there are ops and there are ops... are you speaking to ops regarding managing the hardware itself, or ops re the applications you are running on the hardware? Cloud definitely doesn't remove the latter. Unless your company runs on just a database with no app code.
  - stephenr 11y ago
    > Cloud definitely doesn't remove the latter. Many would disagree with you, and run their business as if that is the case. I'm not saying they are right, I'm saying thats the reality of how a number of decision makers act.
- devonkim 11y ago
  It depends upon what you use your ops staff for that can mean different things and how you're structured across a service lifecycle. For example, WhatsApp had no operations engineers that were dedicated - everyone was an operations engineer that was writing the software by helping keep it alive. This to me is the intent for the devops organizational style - your developers have full visibility and responsibility into seeing their code through the entire cycle of existence and can quickly fix and prevent problems better than split teams. While most software developers tend to be terrible operations engineers and vice versa, I'm quite sure that well-written software makes operations work far, far easier and thus makes O&S much cheaper as a result. Also, a lot of companies opt to use Heroku first then migrate to basic ol' AWS once that gets far too expensive for them and may hire an operations engineer or two to replace the cost and to help them scale better with capital. NoOps in a very literal sense being used to describe tech operations is something I never think I'll see anyone take seriously and that can scale.
mseebach 11y ago
Actually, that's exactly what outsourcing is. You buy a well-known commodity service off the shelf from a provider that has the scale to maintain real expertise and reap significant economies of scale. It's been done that way for physical products forever (you never see a company with an in-house carpentry shop making it's own office furniture). It's the "replace an in-house team with a broadly equivalent external team" version of outsourcing of recent years that's the bastard.
jasode 11y ago
>That's not really outsourcing. That's shifting from capital expenses to operating expenses The "capital (depreciation) vs operating" is only talking about hardware. Having in-house IT employees to install new servers, run new cabling, change tapes for backups, etc, is not a capital expense. Migrating to AWS can shift the FTEs from XYZ company's payroll to Amazon's payroll. Presumably, Amazon's engineers can do IT admin operations in a more cost-efficient manner. That's "outsourcing." Yes, there would still be in-house employees as "AWS admins" but overall, there should be a net-reduction of FTEs doing commodity-IT grunt work.