4 ms·

I'll note that he says he works in the video game industry, where infra engineer/sysad/etc salaries are, in my anecdotal experience, significantly lower than ev

I'll note that he says he works in the video game industry, where infra engineer/sysad/etc salaries are, in my anecdotal experience, significantly lower than even run of the mill positions in "regular" companies, and especially lower than SV/startup/big tech companies. Offers I've received from several game companies were less than 50% of what I had from other companies, and I was told when I tried to negotiate that they wanted people that were passionate about games and what they were building, and not people just looking for a cushy job. That can change the economics on the situation.

scarface74 7y ago
I’m not even coming from the perspective of a Silicon Valley big tech company. I’m in Atlanta. We would need at least three additional employees to handle our infrastructure/dev ops workload at a colo and that would be around a half a million dollars for the fully allocated cost to hire them. As opposed to the additional cost of the business support plan, the cost of the MSP, and hiring senior developers who are know their way around AWS. Also we finally hired one person to coordinate everything and take the busy work off the back of the leads. We can do a lot with a half million dollars a year on AWS.
- dijit 7y ago
  To add a little context I currently spend around 500,000 CAD on infra in GCP per month, which is roughly half of my total infrastructure (in terms of raw compute/bandwidth use). The remaining metal costs 100,000 CAD / month. As I was implying. You’re just outsourcing your ops. At scale, you end up spending significantly more than you expect.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    That’s the difference. Whether you operate at a small scale or a large scale, if you have web servers, database servers, load balancers, build servers, network infrastructure etc. If you are at a colo, you still have a minimum number of people you have to hire and no one who is any good is going to work below market rates and if they are any good, they would probably be bored out of their minds at a small company. “Outsourcing your ops” makes perfect sense until it doesn’t. Also, when I put my software architect hat on (and take my infrastructure hat off), it’s a lot quicker to get things done just to ask our MSp to open an empty account in our AWS Organization, spin up the entire infrastructure, pilot it, get it approved, audited, and then run the same template in the production account without having to wait on a change request, approvals, pre approval security audits, etc. I’m also not advocating all in on cloud. With a Direct Connect from your colo to your cloud infrastructure, it makes sense sometimes to have a hybrid solution. Everything from using your cloud infrastructure as a cold DR standby, using it for green field development where a team doesn’t need to be shackled by change requests, committees, etc
    - dijit 7y ago
      I think we’re agreeing but we draw the line in different places. Cloud is great for speed of deployment. But once something is made, stable and has predictable load then it’s a huge cost saving to bring it in-house. Many don’t, probably because they’ve used some cloud only technologies or fear the migration path will take time. So you just continually line bezos pockets instead of using the cost savings to remain liquid.

scarface74 7y ago

I’m not even coming from the perspective of a Silicon Valley big tech company. I’m in Atlanta. We would need at least three additional employees to handle our infrastructure/dev ops workload at a colo and that would be around a half a million dollars for the fully allocated cost to hire them. As opposed to the additional cost of the business support plan, the cost of the MSP, and hiring senior developers who are know their way around AWS. Also we finally hired one person to coordinate everything and take the busy work off the back of the leads. We can do a lot with a half million dollars a year on AWS.

dijit 7y ago
To add a little context I currently spend around 500,000 CAD on infra in GCP per month, which is roughly half of my total infrastructure (in terms of raw compute/bandwidth use). The remaining metal costs 100,000 CAD / month. As I was implying. You’re just outsourcing your ops. At scale, you end up spending significantly more than you expect.
- scarface74 7y ago
  That’s the difference. Whether you operate at a small scale or a large scale, if you have web servers, database servers, load balancers, build servers, network infrastructure etc. If you are at a colo, you still have a minimum number of people you have to hire and no one who is any good is going to work below market rates and if they are any good, they would probably be bored out of their minds at a small company. “Outsourcing your ops” makes perfect sense until it doesn’t. Also, when I put my software architect hat on (and take my infrastructure hat off), it’s a lot quicker to get things done just to ask our MSp to open an empty account in our AWS Organization, spin up the entire infrastructure, pilot it, get it approved, audited, and then run the same template in the production account without having to wait on a change request, approvals, pre approval security audits, etc. I’m also not advocating all in on cloud. With a Direct Connect from your colo to your cloud infrastructure, it makes sense sometimes to have a hybrid solution. Everything from using your cloud infrastructure as a cold DR standby, using it for green field development where a team doesn’t need to be shackled by change requests, committees, etc
  - dijit 7y ago
    I think we’re agreeing but we draw the line in different places. Cloud is great for speed of deployment. But once something is made, stable and has predictable load then it’s a huge cost saving to bring it in-house. Many don’t, probably because they’ve used some cloud only technologies or fear the migration path will take time. So you just continually line bezos pockets instead of using the cost savings to remain liquid.