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> This isn't simply about having fewer staff (although that can reduce internal politics and inefficiencies), but making fewer decisions and more importantly re

• jedberg 7y ago
  Yeah but you don’t need data center engineers, real estate specialists. Power specialists. Etc.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • briandear 7y ago
    Nor do you have to pay the rent on the buildings where those things happen.
  • ddorian43 7y ago
    You can rent dedicated server or onprem ? people always go from cloud to building your own cpu in these threads, never in the middle
    • rhizome 7y ago
      Well spotted.
    • twa927 7y ago
      Yes, this also seems weird to me. And I think it might be a cultural thing, I noticed that in Europe renting dedicated servers is far more popular than in the US.
      • esoterica 7y ago
        Maybe it’s because wages are a lot lower in Europe? Better to outsource to the cloud than hire more people if people are expensive.
        • angry_octet 7y ago
          IDK where you get the 'wages are a lot lower in Europe' thing. There are lower cost and higher cost places, but people are expensive and talent is mobile.
          • shsjxjbsbs 7y ago
            I don’t know, in the Bay Area 150k is entry level and big companies pay 250k or much higher to senior engineers. Whenever I hear about pay in Europe it’s a fraction of that. It may be worth it for a different lifestyle, I’m not making that argument. Regardless, from the company POV it must lead to different choices about buy vs. build.
            • angry_octet 7y ago
              Bay area or NYC sure, that's like being in London, but what about the Midwest, or any of the places where you can easily set up an IT shop without paying a premium for space?
              • ericd 7y ago
                My impression is that programmer and IT salaries are SF>>NYC>>London, even if living costs aren’t similarly different.
              • tekknik 7y ago
                how will you attract the talent?
                • angry_octet 7y ago
    • pentae 7y ago
      Yeah we literally turned our $7k a month AWS bill into $1k a month by changing to 3 dedicated servers (Fully managed!) and cloudflare. It's better in every conceivable way.
      • tekknik 7y ago
        what instance types were you using? do the dedis have the same specs as the ec2 instances? what about contracts (do you have one on the dedis?) are you only using servers or other aws services?
      • WrtCdEvrydy 7y ago
        For anyone doing this... look around. Tooling has only improved. We were able to cram a large set of applications into a group of instances using CapRover. Instead of 2-3 instances, and a whole bunch of RDS, we ended just recreating the databases there along with minio for storage (we write a small amount of data to S3 storage).
    • dragontamer 7y ago
      Colocation is another in-between. Build your own server, but the racks / datacenter / power delivery / real estate / network is all rented from another group. Colocation is probably ideal for anyone using custom hardware: like GPUs or FPGAs. If you're using "normal" CPUs, just buy dedicated instances instead.
    • dboreham 7y ago
      Renting bare metal is exactly how the business worked prior to the rise of EC2. e.g Rackspace, Linode. You can rent vs buy at any level : rent only machines, rent a 1/2 a rack, rent a full rack, rent a cage, rent 1/2 a dc, and so on. Same with connectivity: you can plug your machines into a lan managed by the hosting provider, or run your own routers and peer with their in-house ISP, or you can buy peering directly in the building, or you can rent lightpath from a telco with pop in the building, or you can go rent a backhoe and start trenching across the parking lot...
      • mysidia 7y ago
        If you rent the backhoe... make sure you call before you dig and don't cut one of my fibers, please.
    • jjeaff 7y ago
      Ya, I feel like this must be coming from the younger crowd who is just used to seeing all the cloud marketing comparing cloud computer to building your own data center. Anyone who has been in the industry since pre-cloud explosion knows that most people just rented bare metal and at the more complicated end they might purchase their own hardware and colocate. And for those that own their servers, many lease them and HP or Dell or whoever maintains them on site if anything goes wrong.
  • zaroth 7y ago
    You can outsource the physical data center and connectivity without paying massive premium for a software stack which in many ways requires more expertise to operate at scale and redundancy than the in-house alternative, while costing an order of magnitude more money and locking you into a potential competitor’s ecosystem.
  • rhizome 7y ago
    If you reduce companies to "developers hiring developers, led by a couple of business people," how resilient will that company be? I'd say it keeps them at a disadvantage for either elimination or acquisition, but dependent nonetheless. Maybe cloud usage can be an indicator whether a company has plans to maintain independence into the future, despite the loyalty-engendering words of leadership.
  • dijit 7y ago
    Sure. You just need more people to keep an eye on what your consumption rates are. Or to handle access control systems or manage service accounts and client certificates, ensure firewalls, additional tooling around firewalls to ensure things aren’t getting exposed outside. Countless cost projections on top of a complicated billing system. I mean. You save the headcount in one area and you consume it in another. And you pay overhead in outsourcing costs. It’s likely worth it. But you need to determine that on a case by case basis. My (large) company is too incompetent to do hosting properly so cloud was a blessing for us.
    • YokoZar 7y ago
      > Sure. You just need more people to keep an eye on what your consumption rates are. Or to handle access control systems or manage service accounts and client certificates, ensure firewalls, additional tooling around firewalls to ensure things aren’t getting exposed outside. Countless cost projections on top of a complicated billing system. At a certain scale, you need all these things with internal clouds too. Resource provisioning, basic security, and managing "insider risk" don't just go away when you own the infrastructure.
      • dijit 7y ago
        Not nearly in the same way. This is like saying that "You also need to have a cashier!" when you're comparing a shopping mall to a corner store.
        • runT1ME 7y ago
          How so? Presumably someone with an internal 'cloud' needs someone to be responsible for a large kube cluster, to handle a uniform way to do scheduling/resource management, etc. Having an engineer who knows how to do this in AWS doesn't seem more expensive than an engineer who can roll their own internal 'cloud' system...
          • hunter2_ 7y ago
            Just curious, do you put 'cloud' in quotes to indicate that you're using a different definition of the word?
  • Spooky23 7y ago
    Sure you do, you’re just blending them into the rate, at a significant margin. Cloud is awesome for companies where the capital investment needed to deliver the SLA is too expensive. If you’re big, and you run the numbers, lots of services are better in a datacenter that you manage. Many of the early advantages of cloud tools aren’t a differentiator today. If anything, the granular billing is a nightmare to manage in many large enterprises. There’s a reason AWS heavily targets .gov customers — the Feds probably waste billions on idle services. I’ve found that the shitty to support or known workload services are best somebody else’s problem. Email is an example of both. Most other things are trading IT complexity with accounting complexity.
    • coredog64 7y ago
      Counterpoint: Granular billing of real money can actually drive behavioral changes in ways that fake money and/or letting one department slide because you’re hoping it’s head will rubber stamp your promotion doesn’t.
  • walshemj 7y ago
    If you build your own DC you would outsource that to a consultancy or contractor.
• PopeDotNinja 7y ago
  There's nothing simple about debugging opaque error messages & client quirks on AWS.
• aeturnum 7y ago
  > This is a myth directly from cloud providers marketing campaigns I agree the cloud providers like this idea, but I'm not sure I agree it's a myth. Businesses need to choose what competencies to focus on. For nearly every other area, businesses rely on suppliers. Auto manufacturers use machines built by other businesses and parts built by other businesses. They also obviously do some amount of in-house part and tool design. It's a balance and I think that it's a lot more likely that most businesses will want a good partner to provide infrastructure (ultimately at margins less than AWS) instead of building it themselves.
  • learc83 7y ago
    > Auto manufacturers use machines built by other businesses and parts built by other businesses. Yeah but they generally aren't renting those machines. Renting critical pieces of business infrastructure that aren't easily replaceable is opening yourself up to rent seeking on the part of your supplier. Remember the Oracle business model--lock people in and then keep raising the price just below what it would cost to rebuild from scratch.
    • weberc2 7y ago
      Why is it better to be locked into your own company’s IT department rather than AWS? I would argue AWS gives a better ROI than 95% of corporate IT departments, and generally less hostile to boot.
      • greglindahl 7y ago
        One hopes you're not arguing that companies shouldn't bother trying to figure out if they're in the 95% or the 5%.
        • weberc2 7y ago
          No, it wouldn’t make sense for me to make the 95/5 distinction only to prescribe a 100/0 response. My post was a call for sober judgment, which is admittedly not very popular here.
• gowld 7y ago
  Why does this argument apply to AWS but not to desktop IT providers, paper office supplies, janitors, cafeteria services, and everything else that a business hires vendors for?
• nwallin 7y ago
  I don't necessarily think you're wrong, but I think you're missing the point. Situation: some manager is tasked with updating some antiquated COBOL monstrosity. They're given twelve peanuts, some shoe string, bubble gum and a little bit of duct tape. The experienced staff have all been aged out, quit out of frustration or laid off and replaced with fresh college grads for half the price which was a great deal and significantly reduced costs for several consecutive quarters, earning a well deserved healthy bonus. Unfortunately reliability of the system has been suffering and the young engineering team unanimously agrees the old system should be replaced. Option 1: do it in house with the young team of rockstars the manager has been bragging to management about. Unfortunately, the manager secretly has reservations and has doubts about the team's experience, let alone skills. It's too risky. Not too risky to the company who can easily absorb the loss and move on, but too risky for the middle manager who will look bad and possibly get fired. Option 2: outsource the entire thing to IBM or Oracle. Tempting, but not in the budget. Also, significant parts of the old system are on IBM anyway and the cost of hiring IBM people to fly out has been increasingly expensive after the latest round off layoffs saw Scott put out to pasture. No, it's too risky. Not risky to the company who can have uptime guarantees in the contract, but risky to the manager who will look bad if he comes in over budget. Option 3: The Cloud. It's the 'in' thing. FAANG are all all in on it, and if it works for them it could work for us. Much of the new team used AWS for their web dev class in college, so the skills are fresh. There's very little risk to it. The staffing requirements will be dramatically reduced so costs will drop. The manager will be able to deliver an awesome demo next quarter and the S3 instance they'll host it on will only cost one or two of their peanuts. The only risk is if the manager doesn't get promoted before the problems start, which shouldn't be a problem because AWS has such great onboarding programs. It is slightly more risky for the company though, who may find themselves no longer in control of critical infrastructure. Risk for the company isn't the same as risk for a mid level decision maker. Small fuckups carry the same penalty as huge fuckups. (you get fired) From my fake story, doing it in house has a relatively high chance of being a minor fuckup, and AWS has a relatively low chance of being a major fuckup. The manager is going to choose the low probability risk, even though the low impact risk is the company's best interest. And let's be honest... a remarkably large fraction of small IT shops are really bad at certain basic competencies, notably backup reliability and timely application of updates. AWS is pretty good at sysadmin and accounting 101, even if it stumbles at 201.
• croh 7y ago
  wholeheartedly agree. Also very few companies, need scaling like netflix. But hype of AWS makes inexperienced architect to choose stack without looking into pricing and complexity. Later projects are continued by throwing more resources on cloud.
• pmart123 7y ago
  Most medium size companies still would be using a data center provider today to handle the server/hardware maintenance and security. I think it comes down more to how likely is a workload going to change or interact with cloud services or api’s. If you have a CRM system used by a 15 person sales team growing one person a year, it probably is cheaper to self host in some ways. At the same time, if it goes down, someone internally needs to fix it. If all the sudden you want to run some data analytics project on the prospect and customer data, potentially the project is road blocked if more server space needs to be provisioned, etc.
• WhiteOwlLion 7y ago
  If you already have IT staff in-house it ends up being a duplication of roles and an added layer of complexity. I get some servers and/or resources can benefit from autoscale. USGS gets slammed after a major earthquake so having autoscale capability is important. Or you want to co-locate some servers (payroll) for disaster recovery purposes. There are some legitimate uses cases, but often cloud just feels like renting servers that you could own and manage in-house.