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You still need the IT team to babysit the AWS infrastructure. I've seen this "even a lift-and-shift reduces TCO" argument before, but it only ever works if you

You still need the IT team to babysit the AWS infrastructure. I've seen this "even a lift-and-shift reduces TCO" argument before, but it only ever works if you pretend that AWS lives up to its zero-management hype. Maybe, for someone, it does. Not for any deployment I've seen. This never prevents management from pretending, of course. EDIT: ah, I've seen that the argument has retreated to "it reduces IT headcount." Again, maybe for someone, but I have yet to see it actually work, and every time management has just hustled the TCO calculation.

acdha 5y ago
> You still need the IT team to babysit the AWS infrastructure. … it only ever works if you pretend that AWS lives up to its zero-management hype. Who is saying zero-management? If you have a consultant lying to you, that's not a cloud problem and I've heard the same people lie about all kinds of on-premise services as well. What I've heard the major cloud providers say is true: you need _less_ staff and you can spend time on different things, which has been generally true. For example, instead of needing to configure a bunch of network hardware (which is a distinct skill you need to hire) you can have a general devops person use Terraform to manage routes, firewall rules, etc. without also needing to be a Cisco expert and spending time operating the underlying hardware. The key question to ask is where your infrastructure was to start with. If you have an A-grade ops team, a lift-and-shift will probably not be much of a cost savings because you presumably already have economies of scale working in your favor, unless you have enough bursty workloads to pay for it that way. The catch is that most places do not have that high-end ops capacity so what you're really doing is taking your limited IT capacity and reclaiming the time which is currently going into things like managing Dell firmware updates.

acdha 5y ago

> You still need the IT team to babysit the AWS infrastructure. … it only ever works if you pretend that AWS lives up to its zero-management hype. Who is saying zero-management? If you have a consultant lying to you, that's not a cloud problem and I've heard the same people lie about all kinds of on-premise services as well. What I've heard the major cloud providers say is true: you need _less_ staff and you can spend time on different things, which has been generally true. For example, instead of needing to configure a bunch of network hardware (which is a distinct skill you need to hire) you can have a general devops person use Terraform to manage routes, firewall rules, etc. without also needing to be a Cisco expert and spending time operating the underlying hardware. The key question to ask is where your infrastructure was to start with. If you have an A-grade ops team, a lift-and-shift will probably not be much of a cost savings because you presumably already have economies of scale working in your favor, unless you have enough bursty workloads to pay for it that way. The catch is that most places do not have that high-end ops capacity so what you're really doing is taking your limited IT capacity and reclaiming the time which is currently going into things like managing Dell firmware updates.