5 ms·

From the caveat at the end of the original article: > This article doesn’t take into account other aspects that would make the comparison even more complicated

From the caveat at the end of the original article: > This article doesn’t take into account other aspects that would make the comparison even more complicated. These include people skills, financial controls, cash flow, capacity planning depending on the load type, etc. You can't handwave all this away in real life though. If you're rolling your own data center, the engineering time you need to put into managing servers, upgrades, hardware replacements, 24/7 oncall rotations etc etc is considerable and will often dwarf the costs of the hardware itself, particularly at startup scale. With a cloud provider, it's (almost) all abstracted away.

vidarh 4y ago
One of my longest contracts was being on call for a a company to assist with their cloud setup. Most of this is not abstracted away all that well. Having managed both on premises, colocated, managed servers and cloud services, my customers when I was consulting tended to need more of my time for similar sized setups to manage cloud setups. Yes, with a colocated setup we needed to rack and wire up servers, but the amount of time spent for the lifetime of a server was typically measured in single digit number of hours amortised over several years. EDIT: As to why the time to manage colocated servers is so low, consider that pretty much everything has IPMI or similar now, so apart from a few hours setting up an initial provisioning server for the entire environment, on a per server basis you're connecting power, screwing on rails, connecting the network, configuring IPMI (remote reboot, remote KVM, remote sensor access), running your provisioning scripts and starting (automated) burn-in tests, and then you have a bunch of new capacity in your orchestrator at the end of it. Everything else is pretty much the same as using a cloud provider, except your instance sizes are tailored to your actual workloads. The odd replacement of broken equipment can often be handled by your colo provider. When I was racking equipment myself, I'd often install more than one server an hour, and then not touch that server again physically for several years. Monitoring is largely the same - you need to be able to migrate away from failing instances either way, only now some of those failures might mean hardware has failed and you have a few more indicators in your monitoring system matching your IPMI sensors.
- margorczynski 4y ago
  I think there's a lot of FUD spread by Cloud providers and people who make money mainly out of it ("Cloud Engineers", consultants, etc.) about how hard it is to setup and manage hardware + software. In many cases it is actually easier to do it for a bespoke solution than some cloud Frankenstein.
johnklos 4y ago
You know, you can't hand wave away all the additional costs of having anything in the cloud. You need lawyers to tell you your liability for using third parties. You need all that time and money engineering cloud solutions that work, that can scale, and aren't going cost tons of money. You need to factor all those multi-hour calls needed to get to a real person at the cloud company who isn't reading from a multiple choice book and actually knows what you're talking about. You need a rotation of people available 24/7 to know what to look for in the cloud instance and can handle things if / when they go sideways. All these costs are considerable and will often dwarf the costs of the oversimplified cloud estimate you're first given, particularly at startup scale. With an in-house team of systems administrators and colocated hardware, it's (almost) all well understood and abstracted away. I wonder if people have actually thought about the costs you mention, or if the marketing forces that have led everyone to believe that everything should in the cloud are why people who've never done the slightest work in a datacenter think the cloud is the way to go. I hear it all the time, but people can't articulate real reasons aside from general handwaving about how much salary a company can save from getting rid of systems administrators. But I've also worked for companies that don't even have a single systems administrator of their own, and trust me - they pay much more money for everything as compared with paying for a good admin.
- bsenftner 4y ago
  The curse of our industry: the majority of us are weak communicators, unable to explain why they sense the cloud is a poor choice. Meanwhile, the cloud sales people - picked because they are adept communicators - create a comprehensive reasoning mesh, literally playing with the in-house developers inability to explain the dangers they know and with which they are trying to snare the client.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
sysadmindotfail 4y ago
I worked in Datacenter Ops for a decade+, running 3-6 private datacenters as an HPC/Nix admin wearing many hats. The amount of work involved with physical plant, circuit management, staff coverage, weather events, regulation, travel, hardware upgrades, replacement...the list was seemingly endless. That's also not to mention hopefully you never have to staff augment for junior-level tasks. Try hiring someone to correctly rack and stack an entire rack. You just end up re-doing it yourself or paying CDW to ship you an entire pre-assembled rack the next time.

vidarh 4y ago

One of my longest contracts was being on call for a a company to assist with their cloud setup. Most of this is not abstracted away all that well. Having managed both on premises, colocated, managed servers and cloud services, my customers when I was consulting tended to need more of my time for similar sized setups to manage cloud setups. Yes, with a colocated setup we needed to rack and wire up servers, but the amount of time spent for the lifetime of a server was typically measured in single digit number of hours amortised over several years. EDIT: As to why the time to manage colocated servers is so low, consider that pretty much everything has IPMI or similar now, so apart from a few hours setting up an initial provisioning server for the entire environment, on a per server basis you're connecting power, screwing on rails, connecting the network, configuring IPMI (remote reboot, remote KVM, remote sensor access), running your provisioning scripts and starting (automated) burn-in tests, and then you have a bunch of new capacity in your orchestrator at the end of it. Everything else is pretty much the same as using a cloud provider, except your instance sizes are tailored to your actual workloads. The odd replacement of broken equipment can often be handled by your colo provider. When I was racking equipment myself, I'd often install more than one server an hour, and then not touch that server again physically for several years. Monitoring is largely the same - you need to be able to migrate away from failing instances either way, only now some of those failures might mean hardware has failed and you have a few more indicators in your monitoring system matching your IPMI sensors.

margorczynski 4y ago
I think there's a lot of FUD spread by Cloud providers and people who make money mainly out of it ("Cloud Engineers", consultants, etc.) about how hard it is to setup and manage hardware + software. In many cases it is actually easier to do it for a bespoke solution than some cloud Frankenstein.

johnklos 4y ago

You know, you can't hand wave away all the additional costs of having anything in the cloud. You need lawyers to tell you your liability for using third parties. You need all that time and money engineering cloud solutions that work, that can scale, and aren't going cost tons of money. You need to factor all those multi-hour calls needed to get to a real person at the cloud company who isn't reading from a multiple choice book and actually knows what you're talking about. You need a rotation of people available 24/7 to know what to look for in the cloud instance and can handle things if / when they go sideways. All these costs are considerable and will often dwarf the costs of the oversimplified cloud estimate you're first given, particularly at startup scale. With an in-house team of systems administrators and colocated hardware, it's (almost) all well understood and abstracted away. I wonder if people have actually thought about the costs you mention, or if the marketing forces that have led everyone to believe that everything should in the cloud are why people who've never done the slightest work in a datacenter think the cloud is the way to go. I hear it all the time, but people can't articulate real reasons aside from general handwaving about how much salary a company can save from getting rid of systems administrators. But I've also worked for companies that don't even have a single systems administrator of their own, and trust me - they pay much more money for everything as compared with paying for a good admin.

bsenftner 4y ago
The curse of our industry: the majority of us are weak communicators, unable to explain why they sense the cloud is a poor choice. Meanwhile, the cloud sales people - picked because they are adept communicators - create a comprehensive reasoning mesh, literally playing with the in-house developers inability to explain the dangers they know and with which they are trying to snare the client.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

sysadmindotfail 4y ago

I worked in Datacenter Ops for a decade+, running 3-6 private datacenters as an HPC/Nix admin wearing many hats. The amount of work involved with physical plant, circuit management, staff coverage, weather events, regulation, travel, hardware upgrades, replacement...the list was seemingly endless. That's also not to mention hopefully you never have to staff augment for junior-level tasks. Try hiring someone to correctly rack and stack an entire rack. You just end up re-doing it yourself or paying CDW to ship you an entire pre-assembled rack the next time.