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No doubt people will be commenting here on how cloud makes sense because you don’t have to hire experts to run your own computers. Folks…… it’s pure fiction th

No doubt people will be commenting here on how cloud makes sense because you don’t have to hire experts to run your own computers. Folks…… it’s pure fiction that cloud does not require experts to run it. Cloud is more expensive and slower often more complex, and risks major vendor lock-in if you use the cloud vendors APIs instead of open source solutions. And if you need GPU computing you’d be crazy to use cloud GPUs which are much, much more expensive and much much slower than consumer grade GPUs. And if you can summarise which parts of your system are incurring traffic costs then you’re beating the deliberately complex systems intended to nickel and dime your architecture every time a byte turns a corner.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
I remember a time when SQL was advertised as "write programs in plain English and fire all your programmers". It ended with the situation where you can't get a job for Oracle SQL if you only know Microsoft SQL. Are we already at a point where you can't get a job as AWS DevOps if you only worked with Azure before?
siva7 4y ago
Sure, cloud is usually more expensive, so is developer time. If your team is wrangling more with the quirks of your own setup instead of the standardized workflow of a paas provider, your calculation won't work in your favour anymore.
- andrewstuart 4y ago
  I have seen vast amounts of developer effort go into “programming the cloud instead of the application”. It’s complete fiction that somehow developers are freed for all except application coding if the use the cloud.
  - brianmcc 4y ago
    A million application devs who used to write Java and SQL, but now do mostly Terraform, laugh and give a nostalgic sigh...
    - andrewstuart 4y ago
      And then turn back to trying to work out how to grant IAM access to the resource that developer asked for before turning their attention to why traffic won’t come out of the VPC before trying to work out how to do compression on API gateway. The whole time pining for the old days of running everything on Linux.
      - brianmcc 4y ago
        The good old days of SFTP-ing one's .war files up to Tomcat and just have the sys admin team sort out Apache and SSL. Happy times :-)
        eastbound 4y ago
        Sending the .war in a ticket. Writing upgrade notes. Waiting half a week for deployment. Did a mistake. Pray that reopening the ticket will go faster. I remember when GitHub started saying “We deploy a few hundred times a day.”
- brodouevencode 4y ago
  Not sure why the downvotes. I don't completely agree with your point but it's not a bad one.
xwdv 4y ago
Is there a way to just provide the hardware for your machines somewhere and have someone else manage everything else?
- andrewstuart 4y ago
  Rent a server from ionos for $50/month.
- vidarh 4y ago
  Yes, you can. I used to provide those kind of services on retainer. Actually managing the "low level" parts of "everything else" was always a near rounding error of the cost, though. Managing modern hardware is not time intensive. And then you put a VM/container setup on top and tie it into an orchestrator and it still looks like a a PaaS to the devs.
- dathinab 4y ago
  yes, through depends what you mean with "everything else". There are "rent a rack" options (you provide hardware, they provide a rack in a datacenter + network switch(es) + management tooling through the network etc. and when asked will replaces RAM/Disks etc as asked). You still have to maintain the OS through depending on the service you get and what you want to do this can be easier then expected (e.g. because networking is handled through their switches/tooling this can makes things easier and if you e.g. just want to run a single application per server there are net-boot options which allow you to do so in a manner similar to running docker containers. But if you want to run your own OCI container orchistrations then it comes with the cost of you having to well do that.). But if you ask for you provide server hardware and container and they manage all the rest then I'm not sure it exists. It seems like a bad deal for them.
- weberer 4y ago
  Yes, that's exactly what "colo" in the title of this article is talking about. It is short for "colocation center". You just take your server to their data center, plug it in, and let them handle all the physical operations of running a data center. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colocation_centre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colocation_centre
csomar 4y ago
AWS "experts" are one of the most expensive. And they'll be pushing for EKS and the whole AWS stack. The funny thing is, if you are using K8s, you might as well setup your own servers. These experts cost upward of $1000/day. Hiring a full time is $150k+, and that's not for the expensive locations.
- GauntletWizard 4y ago
  I'm one of those expensive EKS Experts. I encourage many of my customers to go to other clouds that are cheaper, but there's a) a "Nobody got fired for buying IBM" thing that founders want, and b) Actual value in the AWS Ecosystem of managed products for all sorts of things. If you're using Kubernetes, you want a managed cloud storage solution and you want a managed database solution, and AWS is among the best for those. (Though, personally - I prefer GKE). The smaller VPS providers have solutions for those. DynamoDB, though? Not so much.
- Melatonic 4y ago
  You can also do both - run your own K8's and then just autoscale (during big peaks) into the cloud provider of your choice.
- vidarh 4y ago
  When I was doing devops consulting, my "cloud clients" were always by far my most profitable, because they were so used to that and so blind to the cost savings they could get.
  - eastbound 4y ago
    Maybe the people running on the cloud are, therefore, efficient businesses? despite using a financially costly option? or thanks to AWS allowing an immediate setup ?
    - vidarh 4y ago
      Getting set up in AWS in a remotely manageable way is in no way "immediate" - a lot of my income came from that fact (and another large chunk came from fixing setups that had descended into total chaos because people "just" started spinning up resources without properly managing it) If you want ad hoc rapid setup you can get a managed server up and running about the same time as an instance with AWS too, from a provider that also offers colos and cloud so you can pick and choose and move between the three depending on what is most cost effective for specific needs. In practice, ironically, having that option makes cloud instances even less cost-effective because having the option of spinning up cloud instances an tie them into your environment means your can allow yourself to have less spare capacity on your managed/colo servers.
DeathArrow 4y ago
And by using cloud your app and data become hostages.
- renonce 4y ago
  This applies only to these major cloud providers where traffic costs are like $100 per TB. With a decent VPS or dedicated server you pay $10/TB, €2/TB or 1Gbps unmetered.
dathinab 4y ago
As far as I can tell AWS Cloud requires more expertise to run properly then hardware, but comes with the benefit of more flexibility and availability of various not too hard to integrate services. In a certain way that's the big failure of AWS and similar, in another way it's a big win for them as it means people will pay more then necessary all the time and there is a huge consultant industry pushing people to adapt AWS (and similar) to then charge them for consulting later on. Through this kind of patterns tend to fall apart at some point and only hold up for a while due to monopolistic market dynamics around server centers due to their high cost and locality concerns of customers.
mbesto 4y ago
> it’s pure fiction that cloud does not require experts to run it. You're not wrong, however, in cloud I can just use a single "cloud engineer", as opposed to having to find a: - Hardware specialist (someone who knows how to physically install servers, NAS, SAN, etc.) - Network specialist (someone who knows how to physically install network cards, switches, etc. + config, setup, etc.) - Data center environment specialist (usually can come with the data center, but they still need to be vetted) - Security specialist Oh and btw there are 100+ vendors who supply all of this. So not only do I need to find a, for example, a network specialist, I need to find someone who uses Nagios because my infra lead made that decision.
- jjav 4y ago
  > Hardware specialist, Network specialist, Data center environment specialist If we're talking startups here, still working on product market fit with small active user counts.. this is massive overkill. Every startup I've been part of (except one) could've very easily been hosted from a single server under someone's desk (sure, get two for redundancy). The cost would be approximately nothing instead of a 5 figure AWS monthly bill. This isn't resume-building though, so it doesn't happen. (Amusingly, the one startup I was part of that grew way too big for my "server under the desk" hosting model, they went to a colocated datacenter.) > Security specialist Yes you always need this if you're going to have anything connected on the internet.
- Melatonic 4y ago
  Generally you just need two people (and then probably should have 2 more for redudancy) which would be the System Engineer and the Network Engineer. Between those two they should abe able to do the datacenter work themselves (with physical assistance for racking / moving heavy equipment which is rare). Some of the superstar infrastructure architects I have met could do both jobs easily themselves (although that is rare). Security you should probably have no matter where your shit is hosted......
- antisthenes 4y ago
  Umm...no. Just no. > - Security specialist You need them in both environments if you're serious about security. Unless you somehow believe that being in the "cloud" grants you some kind of security by default? > - Hardware specialist (someone who knows how to physically install servers, NAS, SAN, etc.) You can contract this out to the datacenter itself. This is typically a one-time expense when installing infrastructure that will then last the useful lifetime of the hardware (e.g. 5-7 years) > - Data center environment specialist (usually can come with the data center, but they still need to be vetted) What does this even mean? > - Network specialist (someone who knows how to physically install network cards, switches, etc. + config, setup, etc.) Yes, true, a truly robust network setup that is colocated in multiple data-centers is probably the most difficult thing out of the entire setup. > Oh and btw there are 100+ vendors who supply all of this. You mean Dell? Or HP? > So not only do I need to find a, for example, a network specialist, I need to find someone who uses Nagios because my infra lead made that decision. You just need a linux admin on a contract. If they are worth their salt, they don't even have to be full-time.
amerkhalid 4y ago
This is my experience too. I love cloud as individual developer but it seems every company has a just as many DevOps people as they had System Admins. To me advantage of cloud is easily versioned control and replicate-able environments instead of cost savings.
- renonce 4y ago
  You can have that with infrastructure-as-code solutions like Terraform or k8s as well.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago

I remember a time when SQL was advertised as "write programs in plain English and fire all your programmers". It ended with the situation where you can't get a job for Oracle SQL if you only know Microsoft SQL. Are we already at a point where you can't get a job as AWS DevOps if you only worked with Azure before?

siva7 4y ago

Sure, cloud is usually more expensive, so is developer time. If your team is wrangling more with the quirks of your own setup instead of the standardized workflow of a paas provider, your calculation won't work in your favour anymore.

andrewstuart 4y ago
I have seen vast amounts of developer effort go into “programming the cloud instead of the application”. It’s complete fiction that somehow developers are freed for all except application coding if the use the cloud.
- brianmcc 4y ago
  A million application devs who used to write Java and SQL, but now do mostly Terraform, laugh and give a nostalgic sigh...
  - andrewstuart 4y ago
    And then turn back to trying to work out how to grant IAM access to the resource that developer asked for before turning their attention to why traffic won’t come out of the VPC before trying to work out how to do compression on API gateway. The whole time pining for the old days of running everything on Linux.
    - brianmcc 4y ago
      The good old days of SFTP-ing one's .war files up to Tomcat and just have the sys admin team sort out Apache and SSL. Happy times :-)
      - eastbound 4y ago
        Sending the .war in a ticket. Writing upgrade notes. Waiting half a week for deployment. Did a mistake. Pray that reopening the ticket will go faster. I remember when GitHub started saying “We deploy a few hundred times a day.”
brodouevencode 4y ago
Not sure why the downvotes. I don't completely agree with your point but it's not a bad one.

xwdv 4y ago

Is there a way to just provide the hardware for your machines somewhere and have someone else manage everything else?

andrewstuart 4y ago
Rent a server from ionos for $50/month.
vidarh 4y ago
Yes, you can. I used to provide those kind of services on retainer. Actually managing the "low level" parts of "everything else" was always a near rounding error of the cost, though. Managing modern hardware is not time intensive. And then you put a VM/container setup on top and tie it into an orchestrator and it still looks like a a PaaS to the devs.
dathinab 4y ago
yes, through depends what you mean with "everything else". There are "rent a rack" options (you provide hardware, they provide a rack in a datacenter + network switch(es) + management tooling through the network etc. and when asked will replaces RAM/Disks etc as asked). You still have to maintain the OS through depending on the service you get and what you want to do this can be easier then expected (e.g. because networking is handled through their switches/tooling this can makes things easier and if you e.g. just want to run a single application per server there are net-boot options which allow you to do so in a manner similar to running docker containers. But if you want to run your own OCI container orchistrations then it comes with the cost of you having to well do that.). But if you ask for you provide server hardware and container and they manage all the rest then I'm not sure it exists. It seems like a bad deal for them.
weberer 4y ago
Yes, that's exactly what "colo" in the title of this article is talking about. It is short for "colocation center". You just take your server to their data center, plug it in, and let them handle all the physical operations of running a data center. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colocation_centre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colocation_centre

csomar 4y ago

AWS "experts" are one of the most expensive. And they'll be pushing for EKS and the whole AWS stack. The funny thing is, if you are using K8s, you might as well setup your own servers. These experts cost upward of $1000/day. Hiring a full time is $150k+, and that's not for the expensive locations.

GauntletWizard 4y ago
I'm one of those expensive EKS Experts. I encourage many of my customers to go to other clouds that are cheaper, but there's a) a "Nobody got fired for buying IBM" thing that founders want, and b) Actual value in the AWS Ecosystem of managed products for all sorts of things. If you're using Kubernetes, you want a managed cloud storage solution and you want a managed database solution, and AWS is among the best for those. (Though, personally - I prefer GKE). The smaller VPS providers have solutions for those. DynamoDB, though? Not so much.
Melatonic 4y ago
You can also do both - run your own K8's and then just autoscale (during big peaks) into the cloud provider of your choice.
vidarh 4y ago
When I was doing devops consulting, my "cloud clients" were always by far my most profitable, because they were so used to that and so blind to the cost savings they could get.
- eastbound 4y ago
  Maybe the people running on the cloud are, therefore, efficient businesses? despite using a financially costly option? or thanks to AWS allowing an immediate setup ?
  - vidarh 4y ago
    Getting set up in AWS in a remotely manageable way is in no way "immediate" - a lot of my income came from that fact (and another large chunk came from fixing setups that had descended into total chaos because people "just" started spinning up resources without properly managing it) If you want ad hoc rapid setup you can get a managed server up and running about the same time as an instance with AWS too, from a provider that also offers colos and cloud so you can pick and choose and move between the three depending on what is most cost effective for specific needs. In practice, ironically, having that option makes cloud instances even less cost-effective because having the option of spinning up cloud instances an tie them into your environment means your can allow yourself to have less spare capacity on your managed/colo servers.

DeathArrow 4y ago

And by using cloud your app and data become hostages.

renonce 4y ago
This applies only to these major cloud providers where traffic costs are like $100 per TB. With a decent VPS or dedicated server you pay $10/TB, €2/TB or 1Gbps unmetered.

dathinab 4y ago

As far as I can tell AWS Cloud requires more expertise to run properly then hardware, but comes with the benefit of more flexibility and availability of various not too hard to integrate services. In a certain way that's the big failure of AWS and similar, in another way it's a big win for them as it means people will pay more then necessary all the time and there is a huge consultant industry pushing people to adapt AWS (and similar) to then charge them for consulting later on. Through this kind of patterns tend to fall apart at some point and only hold up for a while due to monopolistic market dynamics around server centers due to their high cost and locality concerns of customers.

mbesto 4y ago

> it’s pure fiction that cloud does not require experts to run it. You're not wrong, however, in cloud I can just use a single "cloud engineer", as opposed to having to find a: - Hardware specialist (someone who knows how to physically install servers, NAS, SAN, etc.) - Network specialist (someone who knows how to physically install network cards, switches, etc. + config, setup, etc.) - Data center environment specialist (usually can come with the data center, but they still need to be vetted) - Security specialist Oh and btw there are 100+ vendors who supply all of this. So not only do I need to find a, for example, a network specialist, I need to find someone who uses Nagios because my infra lead made that decision.

jjav 4y ago
> Hardware specialist, Network specialist, Data center environment specialist If we're talking startups here, still working on product market fit with small active user counts.. this is massive overkill. Every startup I've been part of (except one) could've very easily been hosted from a single server under someone's desk (sure, get two for redundancy). The cost would be approximately nothing instead of a 5 figure AWS monthly bill. This isn't resume-building though, so it doesn't happen. (Amusingly, the one startup I was part of that grew way too big for my "server under the desk" hosting model, they went to a colocated datacenter.) > Security specialist Yes you always need this if you're going to have anything connected on the internet.
Melatonic 4y ago
Generally you just need two people (and then probably should have 2 more for redudancy) which would be the System Engineer and the Network Engineer. Between those two they should abe able to do the datacenter work themselves (with physical assistance for racking / moving heavy equipment which is rare). Some of the superstar infrastructure architects I have met could do both jobs easily themselves (although that is rare). Security you should probably have no matter where your shit is hosted......
antisthenes 4y ago
Umm...no. Just no. > - Security specialist You need them in both environments if you're serious about security. Unless you somehow believe that being in the "cloud" grants you some kind of security by default? > - Hardware specialist (someone who knows how to physically install servers, NAS, SAN, etc.) You can contract this out to the datacenter itself. This is typically a one-time expense when installing infrastructure that will then last the useful lifetime of the hardware (e.g. 5-7 years) > - Data center environment specialist (usually can come with the data center, but they still need to be vetted) What does this even mean? > - Network specialist (someone who knows how to physically install network cards, switches, etc. + config, setup, etc.) Yes, true, a truly robust network setup that is colocated in multiple data-centers is probably the most difficult thing out of the entire setup. > Oh and btw there are 100+ vendors who supply all of this. You mean Dell? Or HP? > So not only do I need to find a, for example, a network specialist, I need to find someone who uses Nagios because my infra lead made that decision. You just need a linux admin on a contract. If they are worth their salt, they don't even have to be full-time.

amerkhalid 4y ago

This is my experience too. I love cloud as individual developer but it seems every company has a just as many DevOps people as they had System Admins. To me advantage of cloud is easily versioned control and replicate-able environments instead of cost savings.

renonce 4y ago
You can have that with infrastructure-as-code solutions like Terraform or k8s as well.