4 ms·

> have to hire But [to state the obvious but sometimes overlooked] you don't just point an AWS account at the company git repo and walk away. There's a lot of

by jjav 4y ago

> have to hire But [to state the obvious but sometimes overlooked] you don't just point an AWS account at the company git repo and walk away. There's a lot of work and expertise needed to keep AWS setup up and running, so you already have to hire people. At a modest size startup we already have close to ten people DevOps team to manage AWS. That same size team could easily keep bare metal servers running. At our scale it's still a bit cheaper to be on AWS, but not too far in the growth curve it'll start to become cheaper to be on bare metal.

antod 4y ago
Yup, I worked for a company that moved everything from colo to AWS. Not only did the annual tech costs increase about 10x (even with all the AWS migration credit funny math), but they ended up with double the number of engineers to look after it. Admittedly this was hopefully only going to apply for a few years until they finished rearchitecting everything, but I doubt it would ever reduce back down to anywhere near the original costs. The equation is also mirrored for something that started and grew on AWS though - going to bare metal means building up tooling and processes you didn't have before. The transition will be expensive in either direction.
doctor_eval 4y ago
Agreed. I was doing some unrelated research yesterday and stumbled upon the fact that apparently (in Australia) 41% of companies see an increase in IT staff after adopting cloud services. [1] I thought this was pretty weird since the original value proposition (AFAIR) was to reduce costs/head count. But everywhere I’ve worked that used AWS, had specialists employed to manage AWS. And I think the value proposition is more that it’s easier to find people who know AWS - because there are training providers and certifications - than people who know how to do everything themselves. Once you get to a certain size I think you can attract a team who can build out rather than buy in, and in so doing reduce costs. [1] https://www2.deloitte.com/au/en/pages/economics/articles/economic-value-cloud-services-australia.html https://www2.deloitte.com/au/en/pages/economics/articles/eco...
- smugma 4y ago
  Increase in IT staff isn’t necessarily bad. It could be companies moving to the cloud better learn the value of IT.
- viridian 4y ago
  > Once you get to a certain size I think you can attract a team who can build out rather than buy in, and in so doing reduce costs. I don't think this true for the vast majority of applications. It's probably true for the Youtube, Netflix, OneDrive, etc critical data path, but when your ownership is more like two dozen applications ranging from tiny (one consumer on some infrequent interval) to mid sized (under 100k requests a minute, for text, json, images, generated UI components), it's damn near impossible to beat from a pricing standpoint. Going back to on prem servers, even doing kubernetes/docker orchestration would likely increase my current team's monthly capital expenditure from ~$14000 a month to somewhere in the realm of 50-60k a month. The sad thing about those prices are that our on prem offerings are very cheap compared to the last price I worked, a $BIGBANK that has multiple data centers in multiple countries. As an internal client with the same footprint we have now, $BIGBANK global infrastructure folks provisioning would take $90-110k and 6 to God even knows how many months depending on how fast you could get through the churn of governance, compliance, security, and controls. Edit: just realized I forgot to mention I'm talking about serverless projects almost exclusively. That's important to the cost savings, because I agree that I'd rather host something in the 9 year old server in my basement and run my own reverse proxy than use EC2/EKS from a cost perspective.
- MajimasEyepatch 4y ago
  My guess is that companies adopting cloud services are companies who consider technology a strategic investment and would likely be hiring more IT staff regardless of the migration. Companies that aren't interested in spending more on IT are also probably not going to do a cloud migration.

by jjav 4y ago

antod 4y ago

Yup, I worked for a company that moved everything from colo to AWS. Not only did the annual tech costs increase about 10x (even with all the AWS migration credit funny math), but they ended up with double the number of engineers to look after it. Admittedly this was hopefully only going to apply for a few years until they finished rearchitecting everything, but I doubt it would ever reduce back down to anywhere near the original costs. The equation is also mirrored for something that started and grew on AWS though - going to bare metal means building up tooling and processes you didn't have before. The transition will be expensive in either direction.

doctor_eval 4y ago

Agreed. I was doing some unrelated research yesterday and stumbled upon the fact that apparently (in Australia) 41% of companies see an increase in IT staff after adopting cloud services. [1] I thought this was pretty weird since the original value proposition (AFAIR) was to reduce costs/head count. But everywhere I’ve worked that used AWS, had specialists employed to manage AWS. And I think the value proposition is more that it’s easier to find people who know AWS - because there are training providers and certifications - than people who know how to do everything themselves. Once you get to a certain size I think you can attract a team who can build out rather than buy in, and in so doing reduce costs. [1] https://www2.deloitte.com/au/en/pages/economics/articles/economic-value-cloud-services-australia.html https://www2.deloitte.com/au/en/pages/economics/articles/eco...

smugma 4y ago
Increase in IT staff isn’t necessarily bad. It could be companies moving to the cloud better learn the value of IT.
viridian 4y ago
> Once you get to a certain size I think you can attract a team who can build out rather than buy in, and in so doing reduce costs. I don't think this true for the vast majority of applications. It's probably true for the Youtube, Netflix, OneDrive, etc critical data path, but when your ownership is more like two dozen applications ranging from tiny (one consumer on some infrequent interval) to mid sized (under 100k requests a minute, for text, json, images, generated UI components), it's damn near impossible to beat from a pricing standpoint. Going back to on prem servers, even doing kubernetes/docker orchestration would likely increase my current team's monthly capital expenditure from ~$14000 a month to somewhere in the realm of 50-60k a month. The sad thing about those prices are that our on prem offerings are very cheap compared to the last price I worked, a $BIGBANK that has multiple data centers in multiple countries. As an internal client with the same footprint we have now, $BIGBANK global infrastructure folks provisioning would take $90-110k and 6 to God even knows how many months depending on how fast you could get through the churn of governance, compliance, security, and controls. Edit: just realized I forgot to mention I'm talking about serverless projects almost exclusively. That's important to the cost savings, because I agree that I'd rather host something in the 9 year old server in my basement and run my own reverse proxy than use EC2/EKS from a cost perspective.
MajimasEyepatch 4y ago
My guess is that companies adopting cloud services are companies who consider technology a strategic investment and would likely be hiring more IT staff regardless of the migration. Companies that aren't interested in spending more on IT are also probably not going to do a cloud migration.