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> ...and it's cheaper too... > You do have to do a lot of things manually... Doing those manual things has a cost, though. In most cases, it's only cheaper i

> ...and it's cheaper too... > You do have to do a lot of things manually... Doing those manual things has a cost, though. In most cases, it's only cheaper if you value engineering time at $0. Fine for a personal project, but the math changes when you're paying a fully-loaded cost of $100-200/hr for engineers and you have a long backlog of more valuable things for them to work on. That's the real reason companies use cloud services: Not because it's cheaper or faster, but because it lets the engineers focus their efforts on the things that differentiate the company. From another perspective: I can change the oil in my car cheaper and faster than driving to a shop and having someone else do it. However, if my time is better spent doing an hour of freelancing work then I'll gladly pay the shop to change my oil while I work.

colechristensen 5y ago
Eh, everything can be automated just as well on bare metal. "The cloud" tends to add complexity not remove it, or at best replace one kind of complexity with another. Bare metal tooling is less familiar and could use some advancement, but basically anything that a cloud compute provider can do can be done on bare metal. A lot of orgs just never bothered to learn how to automate bare metal and ended up doing a lot of manual work.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > Eh, everything can be automated just as well on bare metal. Right, but that's not free. Anything can be automated to match the level of commercial cloud providers given sufficient time and money, but it's far from free. It's easy to underestimate engineering costs when they're hidden behind a fixed annual salary, but once you're looking at the cost/benefit analysis and actually accounting for all the time spent managing bare metal, it's not a good tradeoff for small or even medium size companies.
  - colechristensen 5y ago
    People universally build big complicated systems around cloud providers which are equally not free. Unless you are doing something extremely basic, this is what gets done, with a good deal of experience it seems the complexity of what people do to manage and automate cloud providers is more or less equal to what they do to manage bare metal hardware well.
BiteCode_dev 5y ago
Well, not really. If you are using a cloud solution, you usually needs an engineer that knows this particular solution. Outside of the HN bubble, it's a rare breed and it cost a lot more than your traditional linux admin, that you probably already have anyway. Then you need to design, maintain and debug the distributed cloud system, which is more complex. So you'll have a dedicated person or team for that in both cases. On the other end, setuping a linux box for the common tasks (web server, cache, db, etc) never takes me more than a day.
- makeitdouble 5y ago
  Kinda playing the devil’s advocate, but cloud solution aren’t inherently more complex than administrating a traditional linux. Thinking of securing the OS, configuring a deploy mechanism, managing updates, dealing with lib compatibilities once you have more than 1 app running, etc. That’s a pretty vast and deep set of skills needed. You assume there is already one of such admin in the company, but going cloud first reduce all of the above to Docker/container knowledge, and understanding cloud configurations, which can go from a heroku setup, a GCE set of instances up to a small GKE cluster. You can introduce as much complexity as you are comfortable with.
  - MonaroVXR 5y ago
    >You can introduce as much complexity as you are comfortable with. Reading HN, people still have complexity issues due various reasons.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > Outside of the HN bubble, it's a rare breed and it cost a lot more than your traditional linux admin, that you probably already have anyway. Strongly disagree. It's much easier to find people with experience deploying to particular cloud services than it is to find someone who knows how to setup, managed, and maintain a bare metal Linux system from scratch. It's also much easier to teach a cloud solution than to teach someone everything to know about bootstrapping and maintaining Linux servers in a safe and secure manner. > On the other end, setuping a linux box for the common tasks (web server, cache, db, etc) never takes me more than a day. That's ignoring all of the future overhead of maintaining it and keeping up with updates. Not to mention the required documentation and knowledge sharing to help others understand your custom system so the bus factor isn't 1. It's always easy to get started with one-off systems, but that's missing the bulk of the work.
jjav 5y ago
> In most cases, it's only cheaper if you value engineering time at $0. Clearly not at $0 since the cloud is much more expensive and you need more of it because it's slower. If you could have someone do setup and maintenance for free, obviously you'd be way ahead. So the question is really how much does it cost and whether it's cheaper than the cloud tax. At a previous startup our AWS bill would've been enough to hire about 3 to 4 full time sysadmins at silicon valley rates. Our workload wasn't huge. I estimated at the time we could've taken one month of AWS cost to buy more than enough equipment to run everything in-house with redundancy, then hire two people to run it all and bank the rest. At current startup, we're still very small and have no real customer traffic, but the AWS bill is getting close, not there yet, to pay for one full time person. For a workload that could be hosted on a few ancient laptops over a home DSL line if we wanted. Yes, there's quite the convenience in being able to just click a new instance into existence, but the true cost is also very high. Sure it's just VC money we're all lighting on fire, but I often wonder how much more could be accomplished if we didn't collectively just hand over most of the funding to AWS.
- MonaroVXR 5y ago
  Genuine question, why can't "sys-admin" or are you overloaded with work?

colechristensen 5y ago

Eh, everything can be automated just as well on bare metal. "The cloud" tends to add complexity not remove it, or at best replace one kind of complexity with another. Bare metal tooling is less familiar and could use some advancement, but basically anything that a cloud compute provider can do can be done on bare metal. A lot of orgs just never bothered to learn how to automate bare metal and ended up doing a lot of manual work.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> Eh, everything can be automated just as well on bare metal. Right, but that's not free. Anything can be automated to match the level of commercial cloud providers given sufficient time and money, but it's far from free. It's easy to underestimate engineering costs when they're hidden behind a fixed annual salary, but once you're looking at the cost/benefit analysis and actually accounting for all the time spent managing bare metal, it's not a good tradeoff for small or even medium size companies.
- colechristensen 5y ago
  People universally build big complicated systems around cloud providers which are equally not free. Unless you are doing something extremely basic, this is what gets done, with a good deal of experience it seems the complexity of what people do to manage and automate cloud providers is more or less equal to what they do to manage bare metal hardware well.

BiteCode_dev 5y ago

Well, not really. If you are using a cloud solution, you usually needs an engineer that knows this particular solution. Outside of the HN bubble, it's a rare breed and it cost a lot more than your traditional linux admin, that you probably already have anyway. Then you need to design, maintain and debug the distributed cloud system, which is more complex. So you'll have a dedicated person or team for that in both cases. On the other end, setuping a linux box for the common tasks (web server, cache, db, etc) never takes me more than a day.

makeitdouble 5y ago
Kinda playing the devil’s advocate, but cloud solution aren’t inherently more complex than administrating a traditional linux. Thinking of securing the OS, configuring a deploy mechanism, managing updates, dealing with lib compatibilities once you have more than 1 app running, etc. That’s a pretty vast and deep set of skills needed. You assume there is already one of such admin in the company, but going cloud first reduce all of the above to Docker/container knowledge, and understanding cloud configurations, which can go from a heroku setup, a GCE set of instances up to a small GKE cluster. You can introduce as much complexity as you are comfortable with.
- MonaroVXR 5y ago
  >You can introduce as much complexity as you are comfortable with. Reading HN, people still have complexity issues due various reasons.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> Outside of the HN bubble, it's a rare breed and it cost a lot more than your traditional linux admin, that you probably already have anyway. Strongly disagree. It's much easier to find people with experience deploying to particular cloud services than it is to find someone who knows how to setup, managed, and maintain a bare metal Linux system from scratch. It's also much easier to teach a cloud solution than to teach someone everything to know about bootstrapping and maintaining Linux servers in a safe and secure manner. > On the other end, setuping a linux box for the common tasks (web server, cache, db, etc) never takes me more than a day. That's ignoring all of the future overhead of maintaining it and keeping up with updates. Not to mention the required documentation and knowledge sharing to help others understand your custom system so the bus factor isn't 1. It's always easy to get started with one-off systems, but that's missing the bulk of the work.

jjav 5y ago

> In most cases, it's only cheaper if you value engineering time at $0. Clearly not at $0 since the cloud is much more expensive and you need more of it because it's slower. If you could have someone do setup and maintenance for free, obviously you'd be way ahead. So the question is really how much does it cost and whether it's cheaper than the cloud tax. At a previous startup our AWS bill would've been enough to hire about 3 to 4 full time sysadmins at silicon valley rates. Our workload wasn't huge. I estimated at the time we could've taken one month of AWS cost to buy more than enough equipment to run everything in-house with redundancy, then hire two people to run it all and bank the rest. At current startup, we're still very small and have no real customer traffic, but the AWS bill is getting close, not there yet, to pay for one full time person. For a workload that could be hosted on a few ancient laptops over a home DSL line if we wanted. Yes, there's quite the convenience in being able to just click a new instance into existence, but the true cost is also very high. Sure it's just VC money we're all lighting on fire, but I often wonder how much more could be accomplished if we didn't collectively just hand over most of the funding to AWS.

MonaroVXR 5y ago
Genuine question, why can't "sys-admin" or are you overloaded with work?