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The one thing that I've seen that cloud services such as AWS offer over places that offer dedicated servers or co-locating your own servers is the type of admin

The one thing that I've seen that cloud services such as AWS offer over places that offer dedicated servers or co-locating your own servers is the type of administrator you need. Administrating a server even a dedicated server with terabytes of storage attached to it and many hundred gigabytes of RAM to either correctly run microservices or containers or VMS efficiently and redundantly is a very specialized skill set. Well there's a lot of people who call themselves and admins who can do that, there's really not that many that can do it well. And the moment they encounter problems they lack the skill set to understand why so there now embedded with service contracts to vendors who are giving them the advice on how to run it properly. Scaling up ec2 instances and block storage and all the other cloudy widgets you completely eliminate that specialized skill set. You need people who understand something about operating systems you need people who understand the application but you don't need people who understand in detail how your OS is going to interact with your hypervisor in the metal that it's running on along with how your data storage goes down from application to spinning rust. The cloud service takes care of that specialty for you and all you do is say am I getting the correct performance metrics or not and when you're not you don't care why you just restart your instance or open a ticket with the cloud provider.

lifeplusplus 5y ago
Do you really need containerization if there is one mono-repo and one environment, and using something like GO which is self contained executable. I mean whole appeal of docker/kuber... is that you can spin new servers and configure them at the go.
lifeplusplus 5y ago
Isn't the cost comparable to AWS specialist that you need to hire as devops?
- jfengel 5y ago
  I wouldn't think so, given that operations requires a 24 hour team. That means you have to pay at least 4 people to cover a 168 hour week. If you can replace them with one FTE, even at twice the price, you're saving money. There are surely cheaper ways of sharing those operators with other companies than AWS. My (limited) AWS experience is that it's aimed at providing extremely large-scale service and becomes a price and cognitive burden for startups. They can get away with less service for a lower price.

lifeplusplus 5y ago

Do you really need containerization if there is one mono-repo and one environment, and using something like GO which is self contained executable. I mean whole appeal of docker/kuber... is that you can spin new servers and configure them at the go.

lifeplusplus 5y ago

Isn't the cost comparable to AWS specialist that you need to hire as devops?

jfengel 5y ago
I wouldn't think so, given that operations requires a 24 hour team. That means you have to pay at least 4 people to cover a 168 hour week. If you can replace them with one FTE, even at twice the price, you're saving money. There are surely cheaper ways of sharing those operators with other companies than AWS. My (limited) AWS experience is that it's aimed at providing extremely large-scale service and becomes a price and cognitive burden for startups. They can get away with less service for a lower price.