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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

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.
- mekster 6y ago
  Why pay premium when there are cheaper cloud alternatives? Just get your team to learn a thing or two than being sold by AWS. I'd take it most people just feel enthusiastic about technologies they don't even need and being able to run stuff with mouse clicks makes them feel accomplishing. To me, AWS is just an expensive provider that only makes sense to put backup files because of cheap storage and no incoming bandwidth cost.
  - kroolik 6y ago
    Your post contains two distinctive arguments: paying premium for managed services instead of learning a thing or two, and paying AWS for their services. Re first argument: I don't know how to implement DDoS protection, neither is my company a DDoS protection shop. Should I learn how to do it myself, or pay CloudFlare to do it for me? What about S3? What about Aurora/Dynamo/SQS? Where is the line between "your company TOTALLY has to do it on its own" vs "pay the people who know how to run X to run it for you"? Regarding AWS prices: it's not like you are forced to use AWS. Use the cloud your team is most familiar with. I'm not an expert on cloud offerings, yet if your problem is $20k/month and $15k/month infrastracture costs, you might be solving a wrong problem.
- anonfornoreason 6y ago
  This is a startup/business/tech forum, I am a founder of a 20 person business (hiring 7 more) that does this part-time because it's very low maintenance. I am finally hiring a devops person to handle the command line side of things, though I am still pretty happy to dink around at the datacenter every once in a while. I taught myself as I went. I save about 10x over AWS. I would likely make the same decision today if I was starting from scratch, as I did 12+ years ago when I first started doing infra for our small website. Infra is not magical, it's probably the easiest part of my job. Way easier than messing around with JS dependencies, way easier than troubleshooting a segfault in a C extension for our Rails app, and way easier than marketing, business management, accounting, interacting with legal, etc. And takes less time too.
  - 6y ago

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.

mekster 6y ago
Why pay premium when there are cheaper cloud alternatives? Just get your team to learn a thing or two than being sold by AWS. I'd take it most people just feel enthusiastic about technologies they don't even need and being able to run stuff with mouse clicks makes them feel accomplishing. To me, AWS is just an expensive provider that only makes sense to put backup files because of cheap storage and no incoming bandwidth cost.
- kroolik 6y ago
  Your post contains two distinctive arguments: paying premium for managed services instead of learning a thing or two, and paying AWS for their services. Re first argument: I don't know how to implement DDoS protection, neither is my company a DDoS protection shop. Should I learn how to do it myself, or pay CloudFlare to do it for me? What about S3? What about Aurora/Dynamo/SQS? Where is the line between "your company TOTALLY has to do it on its own" vs "pay the people who know how to run X to run it for you"? Regarding AWS prices: it's not like you are forced to use AWS. Use the cloud your team is most familiar with. I'm not an expert on cloud offerings, yet if your problem is $20k/month and $15k/month infrastracture costs, you might be solving a wrong problem.
anonfornoreason 6y ago
This is a startup/business/tech forum, I am a founder of a 20 person business (hiring 7 more) that does this part-time because it's very low maintenance. I am finally hiring a devops person to handle the command line side of things, though I am still pretty happy to dink around at the datacenter every once in a while. I taught myself as I went. I save about 10x over AWS. I would likely make the same decision today if I was starting from scratch, as I did 12+ years ago when I first started doing infra for our small website. Infra is not magical, it's probably the easiest part of my job. Way easier than messing around with JS dependencies, way easier than troubleshooting a segfault in a C extension for our Rails app, and way easier than marketing, business management, accounting, interacting with legal, etc. And takes less time too.
- 6y ago