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It's a fallacy to save money on personnel. The time saved by not managing low level hardware will be assigned to other tasks. The savings are actually done on i

It's a fallacy to save money on personnel. The time saved by not managing low level hardware will be assigned to other tasks. The savings are actually done on instance costs and flexibility. Physical instances have too much over provisioning and zero flexibility. You can easily be paying for an order of magnitude above the actually used capacity. (This can be helped with VmWare virtualization instead of bare metal but the amount of new companies using VmWare is shrinking and licenses are expensive.) Whereas with the cloud, you can half any instance CPU/memory to save half the money. There is even build in monitoring to analyze usage. There is little waste.

speedplane 8y ago
> Physical instances have too much over provisioning and zero flexibility. You can easily be paying for an order of magnitude above the actually used capacity. The cost of the hardware is not the issue. Paying for 600 machines when you actually need 300 probably "wastes" $50-80k/year in over-provisioned hardware. Hiring a skilled admin to figure out what's going on, optimize the network, and reduce those 600 machines down to 300 probably costs at least $150k/yr in their salary+benefits. The cloud does not decrease the cost of the hardware (it's actually more expensive), but it allows you to reduce the number of admins managing it. That's the cost savings. Given the above example, what would any reasonable general manager do: hire someone to make things more efficient, or just pay for the over-provisioning?
- user5994461 8y ago
  You're hopefully kidding when you say that the costs of the hardware is not an issue. Server grade hardware costs an arm. 600 servers at $10k each, that's $6M upfront. Then another $6M within 3-5 years to renew them. Of course in that example you'd pay someone, even multiple people in fact, to make things more efficient.

speedplane 8y ago

> Physical instances have too much over provisioning and zero flexibility. You can easily be paying for an order of magnitude above the actually used capacity. The cost of the hardware is not the issue. Paying for 600 machines when you actually need 300 probably "wastes" $50-80k/year in over-provisioned hardware. Hiring a skilled admin to figure out what's going on, optimize the network, and reduce those 600 machines down to 300 probably costs at least $150k/yr in their salary+benefits. The cloud does not decrease the cost of the hardware (it's actually more expensive), but it allows you to reduce the number of admins managing it. That's the cost savings. Given the above example, what would any reasonable general manager do: hire someone to make things more efficient, or just pay for the over-provisioning?

user5994461 8y ago
You're hopefully kidding when you say that the costs of the hardware is not an issue. Server grade hardware costs an arm. 600 servers at $10k each, that's $6M upfront. Then another $6M within 3-5 years to renew them. Of course in that example you'd pay someone, even multiple people in fact, to make things more efficient.