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This has been widely known for many years. The crossover point happens much sooner than I think people intuit but most companies never really measure or model i
by jandrewrogers 5y ago
This has been widely known for many years. The crossover point happens much sooner than I think people intuit but most companies never really measure or model it. My experience at a few different companies is that DIY infrastructure pencils out at 30-40% of the cost of the cloud.
There is a learned helplessness when it comes to companies running their own data centers that has become widespread over the last decade. What used to be a fairly mechanical process has almost been mythologized as some kind of arcane art beyond the technical ability of any company that isn't Google or Amazon. Designing data center builds isn't difficult, it is a pretty straightforward albeit detail-oriented blue-collar engineering skill, but it seems few people learn it anymore.
- dilyevsky 5y agoYea pretty soon we’ll have infra engs that had gone through their whole career without ever working a real server rack. I personally find that thought discomforting
- scarface74 5y agoI think people who started out as assembly language programmers thought the same thing. Everything gets abstracted at some point.
- oblio 5y agoNo punch cards?!?
- dilyevsky 5y agoThe problem with that comparison is I don’t have to pay big co to be able to write code in C++
- scarface74 5y agoAnd your on prem infrastructure people are free?
- Terretta 5y agoThe flip side of this is very large enterprises with fleets of thousands to tens of thousands of servers and tech staffs in the hundreds to thousands that with 50 years experience self-hosting, still manage to TCO some 2x - 10x above AWS / Azure retail list pricing, while also taking 9 months to provision a VM on a server.
- fuzzylightbulb 5y agoPointing out that some companies are bad at "self-hosting" is not an argument for cloud. Its an argument to be better at "self-hosting".
- TheCoelacanth 5y agoWhen you are making the choice of whether to self-host or not, why assume that you are going to be good at it? Many companies aren't.