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AWS doesn't manage itself. You still need someone to control your AWS instances.

yowlingcat 6y ago
The whole point of using the AWS ecosystem is generally to use as many of the managed services as possible so as to minimize the latter. If you're using it to be multi-cloud portable, then yes, your point stands -- but then it brings into question whether you're exploiting its capabilities to their full potential.
threatofrain 6y ago
AWS just needs to shave off a few engineers, and at least it has shaved off the need for hardware competency.
TomBombadildoze 6y ago
Of course. However, you don't need someone to provision and monitor power, connectivity, datacenter security, and all the responsibilities AWS absolutely prices in for you. You also substantially reduce your effort and cost toward capacity planning and managing depreciation. You pay for consumption of _all the things_ required to operate compute infrastructure, plus their margin. There are certainly companies and problems for which colocating still makes more sense than the cloud but 9 out of 10 of these articles completely gloss over most of the costs. This article is one of them.
- riku_iki 6y ago
  > you don't need someone to provision and monitor power, connectivity, datacenter security this is all included into colocation service?
Rantenki 6y ago
That's false equivalence. If your instance dies, you don't need to drive over to the colo, plug into a KVM, diagnose, and then pull and re-rack a new server. They do all that stuff, and it's worth the $$$. Also, you'll never get into a situation on AWS where you have a 3 day lead-time for a replacement GBIC, or NVMe drive, or seomthing, while your customers scream and bail out for a competitor that isn't down. Yes, you need to manage the infrastructure, but now it's a software configuration task instead of a physical maintenance one.
- shiftpgdn 6y ago
  99.9% of colo facilities offer 24/7 remote hands. With the extreme cost savings of colo you could build in very significant redundancy, which is to say nothing of how infrequently modern server hardware fails.
- anonfornoreason 6y ago
  I manage a rack of 12 servers, I have 110 hard drives in that rack. I've been managing this rack for a decade. I occasionally go to the datacenter to swap out a machine that is end of life, and I go every 3-6 months to swap out a failing drive or two. I'd estimate I spend < 20 hours a year at the datacenter. Everything else is almost 1:1 with what it would take to manage that using AWS. Obvious anecdata here, but it's not hard to run a redundant physical infrastructure that is low maintenance. Obviously bad luck is a thing, but with the correct planning and setup, physical infrastructure isn't that big of a deal for most web businesses.
  - munk-a 6y ago
    That's true - I was comparing managing a server rack in the office building against AWS - not comparing the relatively light hardware interaction needs when it comes to co-location.
    - addicted 6y ago
      I'm pretty sure the original article is talking about Colo.
  - kroolik 6y ago
    You and people posting similar answers miss a very important point. You've mentioned you have over 10 years of experience managing rack servers. That's super great! This means a company that hires you does not need to use AWS for some of the services, because you've got the necessary expertise to do it yourself. Other companies buy this expertise via fully managed services, like S3 or Aurora. Once you have expertise doing X, it might seem wrong paying premium to cloud providers to do the same thing for you. But other companies don't have you on board. They save themselves time recruiting two sysops with partcular skillset, and spin up a working HA rdbms in a day. Comparing ec2 and vms on xenserver doesn't sound convincing because ec2 itself is simple. But comparing HA Aurora or Dynamo cluster to on-prem solution is a different beast. As a dev, I don't really want to know all the gore details of managing HA rabbitmq, and might opt for SQS instead.

The whole point of using the AWS ecosystem is generally to use as many of the managed services as possible so as to minimize the latter. If you're using it to be multi-cloud portable, then yes, your point stands -- but then it brings into question whether you're exploiting its capabilities to their full potential.

threatofrain 6y ago

AWS just needs to shave off a few engineers, and at least it has shaved off the need for hardware competency.

TomBombadildoze 6y ago

Of course. However, you don't need someone to provision and monitor power, connectivity, datacenter security, and all the responsibilities AWS absolutely prices in for you. You also substantially reduce your effort and cost toward capacity planning and managing depreciation. You pay for consumption of _all the things_ required to operate compute infrastructure, plus their margin. There are certainly companies and problems for which colocating still makes more sense than the cloud but 9 out of 10 of these articles completely gloss over most of the costs. This article is one of them.

riku_iki 6y ago
> you don't need someone to provision and monitor power, connectivity, datacenter security this is all included into colocation service?

Rantenki 6y ago

That's false equivalence. If your instance dies, you don't need to drive over to the colo, plug into a KVM, diagnose, and then pull and re-rack a new server. They do all that stuff, and it's worth the $$$. Also, you'll never get into a situation on AWS where you have a 3 day lead-time for a replacement GBIC, or NVMe drive, or seomthing, while your customers scream and bail out for a competitor that isn't down. Yes, you need to manage the infrastructure, but now it's a software configuration task instead of a physical maintenance one.

shiftpgdn 6y ago
99.9% of colo facilities offer 24/7 remote hands. With the extreme cost savings of colo you could build in very significant redundancy, which is to say nothing of how infrequently modern server hardware fails.
anonfornoreason 6y ago
I manage a rack of 12 servers, I have 110 hard drives in that rack. I've been managing this rack for a decade. I occasionally go to the datacenter to swap out a machine that is end of life, and I go every 3-6 months to swap out a failing drive or two. I'd estimate I spend < 20 hours a year at the datacenter. Everything else is almost 1:1 with what it would take to manage that using AWS. Obvious anecdata here, but it's not hard to run a redundant physical infrastructure that is low maintenance. Obviously bad luck is a thing, but with the correct planning and setup, physical infrastructure isn't that big of a deal for most web businesses.
- munk-a 6y ago
  That's true - I was comparing managing a server rack in the office building against AWS - not comparing the relatively light hardware interaction needs when it comes to co-location.
  - addicted 6y ago
    I'm pretty sure the original article is talking about Colo.
- kroolik 6y ago
  You and people posting similar answers miss a very important point. You've mentioned you have over 10 years of experience managing rack servers. That's super great! This means a company that hires you does not need to use AWS for some of the services, because you've got the necessary expertise to do it yourself. Other companies buy this expertise via fully managed services, like S3 or Aurora. Once you have expertise doing X, it might seem wrong paying premium to cloud providers to do the same thing for you. But other companies don't have you on board. They save themselves time recruiting two sysops with partcular skillset, and spin up a working HA rdbms in a day. Comparing ec2 and vms on xenserver doesn't sound convincing because ec2 itself is simple. But comparing HA Aurora or Dynamo cluster to on-prem solution is a different beast. As a dev, I don't really want to know all the gore details of managing HA rabbitmq, and might opt for SQS instead.