5 ms·

hopefully with your spare 3437 dollars a month you could figure out how to ever maintain such a thing.

by orik 9y ago

Klathmon 9y ago
Where can I find competent sysadmins capable of managing a system like that on their own for $40,000 a year?
- baudehlo 9y ago
  You can buy sysadmin services. This isn't a full time job at that level.
  - Klathmon 9y ago
    Then you are just trading one fee for another, but the "sysadmin services" you are ordering most likely has slower response time, less resources, less knowledge, and worse uptime guarantees than someone like aws. Yeah, at the larger sizes it might make sense, but not for everyone.
    - dismantlethesun 9y ago
      At smaller sizes too. If you just have one server, it's unlikely that the slower response time will loose you 3000 dollars per month which is the savings of dedicated service versus aws. Many small businesses run on leased hardware with on site support. Rackspace for instance made their fortune in that sector.
    - baudehlo 9y ago
      Well you're not comparing to AWS without ops, you're comparing to hiring someone for non-AWS vs managing AWS on your own. Outsourced ops know your systems. They have contracted guarantees. They can manage your own systems, hosted systems or even AWS. Using not-AWS saves you enough to pay for that.
      - jason_pomerleau 9y ago
        > Outsourced ops know your systems. I worked for a MSP for many years, and was well acquainted with our regional competitors. Our uptime and theirs was nowhere near AWS-level. You're getting a different engineer every time you pick up the phone. They most certainly do not know your systems like an internal team would. I regularly saw cascading/circular issues caused by lack of familiarity and/or poor change management. Owning and administering your own iron makes sense at a certain scale, but it's a much bigger scale than most companies will reach.
    - qaq 9y ago
      Nope you have a number for the person that provides the service and you can call her/him. Unless you are at several million per month spend at AWS have fun getting a hold of someone when sh#t hits the fan.
      - late2part 9y ago
        Good luck hiring someone on a demand hourly basis that knows your stuff and won't break your stuff.
        qaq 9y ago
        Hmm never had an issue, but to have people at AWS that know my stuff would start somewhere north of 100 million a year spend on AWS.
- dfinninger 9y ago
  Doesn't make much sense for one server... but if you have 5, then you are looking at $200k. Then as you go up the numbers start making more sense.
  - hinkley 9y ago
    That might get you one admin (we office workers have a mistaken belief that our salary is most of our cost. It's somewhere just north of half.). What do you do when they're on vacation/sick/sleeping? Thing is, I really want us to host our own stuff. For one thing if you don't host anything you lose all competence and then you really are beholden to your cloud provider. But it seems to be that we are in this situation until someone figures out how to comodify servers - and server orchestration - to the point where this stuff gets cheaper to manage again. This pendulum always swings. No sooner will we control our own hardware again than someone will come up with a new way to centralize it.
  - jfoutz 9y ago
    Totally, the thing that's super cool about the amazon instances you don't have to do anything with users, authentication, authorization, networking, dns, backups, monitoring, logging, firewall rules, security patches and upgrades. With a bare metal server you have to manage all of that.
    - late2part 9y ago
      Oh my goodness man, have you managed Amazon instances? Setting up VPCs, IGW, IAM, DNS, EBS Snapshots (and deletions until recent lifecycle), custom metric in coudwatch, and Security Groups is a seriously challenging task just to learn the basics, much less do it right, much less automate it. It's not a bed of roses in the physical world either, but you're simply wrong to say it's easy in the "Cloud" and hard in a DC/Bare Metal.
      - jfoutz 9y ago
        (it was a joke.) There are a zillion things to think about if you're going to have even one machine public on the internet, regardless of the hosting solution. At a small organization there's always that one programmer that's like half sysadmin. I find it amusing that people pretend without bare metal, you'll get all of that person's time back.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- greedo 9y ago
  It's not as if using AWS etc eliminates the need for a good sysadmin...
karthikb 9y ago
That means you only have about $40k/yr to hire a sysadmin assuming they need no supplies or tools...
- _wmd 9y ago
  $40k/yr/server
  - vacri 9y ago
    With correct pricing (3-year commitment), you're actually looking at about $8k/yr/server difference, for 64-core servers. If you're at the point where your workload requires ~12 64-core servers, that difference will net you $100k, which you can spend on the ops staffer.
dfinninger 9y ago
... per server. It really, really depends on on your use case, but there are some scenarios where bare metal just makes more sense. Also there are ones where cloud makes everything much easier. North America-oriented B2B app that's a JavaScript SPA witch connects to some lightweight services fronting a database? I think that's a great contender for the cloud. 500-node Hadoop cluster running 24/7 with heavy load? You are going to see some huge savings by maintaining a Datacenter. You can use the extra 1.7MM/mo. to set up some robust networking equipment and have few people on-site.
- _jal 9y ago
  This. Like every IT trend, "Cloud ops" is the trendy mind-slug that eats everyone's brain and makes them say that everyone who doesn't jump on the bandwagon is going to die broke and unloved in the gutter. Remember how XML meant massively reduced integration costs and firing all your developers because GUI tools would let business managers connect pretty boxes and then kick back to watch the graphs go up and to the right as business exploded? Yeah, so AWS is great, if you're building something that works well on AWS. And that's a large class of apps - if you're throwing up a Drupal front end to a CRUD line-of-business backend, need to push notifications and send some email, sure. You're dead in the middle of their target market. Doing something interesting? Doesn't even have to be as massive as the parent suggests - if you're doing something that blows any of the billable parameters out of the sweet-spot, like bandwidth, storage, latency requirements, things that depend on system-locality, etc., you're much better off building, and using AWS for the pieces which can be broken off that don't hit the pain points.
- late2part 9y ago
  Correct!!!

hopefully with your spare 3437 dollars a month you could figure out how to ever maintain such a thing.

by orik 9y ago

hopefully with your spare 3437 dollars a month you could figure out how to ever maintain such a thing.

Klathmon 9y ago

Where can I find competent sysadmins capable of managing a system like that on their own for $40,000 a year?

baudehlo 9y ago
You can buy sysadmin services. This isn't a full time job at that level.
- Klathmon 9y ago
  Then you are just trading one fee for another, but the "sysadmin services" you are ordering most likely has slower response time, less resources, less knowledge, and worse uptime guarantees than someone like aws. Yeah, at the larger sizes it might make sense, but not for everyone.
  - dismantlethesun 9y ago
    At smaller sizes too. If you just have one server, it's unlikely that the slower response time will loose you 3000 dollars per month which is the savings of dedicated service versus aws. Many small businesses run on leased hardware with on site support. Rackspace for instance made their fortune in that sector.
  - baudehlo 9y ago
    Well you're not comparing to AWS without ops, you're comparing to hiring someone for non-AWS vs managing AWS on your own. Outsourced ops know your systems. They have contracted guarantees. They can manage your own systems, hosted systems or even AWS. Using not-AWS saves you enough to pay for that.
    - jason_pomerleau 9y ago
      > Outsourced ops know your systems. I worked for a MSP for many years, and was well acquainted with our regional competitors. Our uptime and theirs was nowhere near AWS-level. You're getting a different engineer every time you pick up the phone. They most certainly do not know your systems like an internal team would. I regularly saw cascading/circular issues caused by lack of familiarity and/or poor change management. Owning and administering your own iron makes sense at a certain scale, but it's a much bigger scale than most companies will reach.
  - qaq 9y ago
    Nope you have a number for the person that provides the service and you can call her/him. Unless you are at several million per month spend at AWS have fun getting a hold of someone when sh#t hits the fan.
    - late2part 9y ago
      Good luck hiring someone on a demand hourly basis that knows your stuff and won't break your stuff.
      - qaq 9y ago
        Hmm never had an issue, but to have people at AWS that know my stuff would start somewhere north of 100 million a year spend on AWS.
dfinninger 9y ago
Doesn't make much sense for one server... but if you have 5, then you are looking at $200k. Then as you go up the numbers start making more sense.
- hinkley 9y ago
  That might get you one admin (we office workers have a mistaken belief that our salary is most of our cost. It's somewhere just north of half.). What do you do when they're on vacation/sick/sleeping? Thing is, I really want us to host our own stuff. For one thing if you don't host anything you lose all competence and then you really are beholden to your cloud provider. But it seems to be that we are in this situation until someone figures out how to comodify servers - and server orchestration - to the point where this stuff gets cheaper to manage again. This pendulum always swings. No sooner will we control our own hardware again than someone will come up with a new way to centralize it.
- jfoutz 9y ago
  Totally, the thing that's super cool about the amazon instances you don't have to do anything with users, authentication, authorization, networking, dns, backups, monitoring, logging, firewall rules, security patches and upgrades. With a bare metal server you have to manage all of that.
  - late2part 9y ago
    Oh my goodness man, have you managed Amazon instances? Setting up VPCs, IGW, IAM, DNS, EBS Snapshots (and deletions until recent lifecycle), custom metric in coudwatch, and Security Groups is a seriously challenging task just to learn the basics, much less do it right, much less automate it. It's not a bed of roses in the physical world either, but you're simply wrong to say it's easy in the "Cloud" and hard in a DC/Bare Metal.
    - jfoutz 9y ago
      (it was a joke.) There are a zillion things to think about if you're going to have even one machine public on the internet, regardless of the hosting solution. At a small organization there's always that one programmer that's like half sysadmin. I find it amusing that people pretend without bare metal, you'll get all of that person's time back.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
greedo 9y ago
It's not as if using AWS etc eliminates the need for a good sysadmin...

karthikb 9y ago

That means you only have about $40k/yr to hire a sysadmin assuming they need no supplies or tools...

_wmd 9y ago
$40k/yr/server
- vacri 9y ago
  With correct pricing (3-year commitment), you're actually looking at about $8k/yr/server difference, for 64-core servers. If you're at the point where your workload requires ~12 64-core servers, that difference will net you $100k, which you can spend on the ops staffer.

dfinninger 9y ago

... per server. It really, really depends on on your use case, but there are some scenarios where bare metal just makes more sense. Also there are ones where cloud makes everything much easier. North America-oriented B2B app that's a JavaScript SPA witch connects to some lightweight services fronting a database? I think that's a great contender for the cloud. 500-node Hadoop cluster running 24/7 with heavy load? You are going to see some huge savings by maintaining a Datacenter. You can use the extra 1.7MM/mo. to set up some robust networking equipment and have few people on-site.

_jal 9y ago
This. Like every IT trend, "Cloud ops" is the trendy mind-slug that eats everyone's brain and makes them say that everyone who doesn't jump on the bandwagon is going to die broke and unloved in the gutter. Remember how XML meant massively reduced integration costs and firing all your developers because GUI tools would let business managers connect pretty boxes and then kick back to watch the graphs go up and to the right as business exploded? Yeah, so AWS is great, if you're building something that works well on AWS. And that's a large class of apps - if you're throwing up a Drupal front end to a CRUD line-of-business backend, need to push notifications and send some email, sure. You're dead in the middle of their target market. Doing something interesting? Doesn't even have to be as massive as the parent suggests - if you're doing something that blows any of the billable parameters out of the sweet-spot, like bandwidth, storage, latency requirements, things that depend on system-locality, etc., you're much better off building, and using AWS for the pieces which can be broken off that don't hit the pain points.
late2part 9y ago
Correct!!!