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>>A single server can cost over 100K. Network gear can costs way more. "Can" sure... likely to for most orgs no. Certainly not for someone running a 5 figure

>>A single server can cost over 100K. Network gear can costs way more. "Can" sure... likely to for most orgs no. Certainly not for someone running a 5 figure cloud bill... as a reference, our standard compute server we use on prem is $12,000 including a 5 year support contract. > At a certain point, you might outgrow someones else's cloud and build your own, If your buying $100K servers, and $100K network devices, I pretty sure you are at the point

baq 4y ago
if you're buying either, you're paying millions in salaries to technicians and sysadmins and DBAs^W^W^Wdevops and SREs. i've been on both sides of the fence and it's a case of 'grass is always greener on the other side'. the truth is, running any sort of non-trivial infra is ducking expensive.
- bcrosby95 4y ago
  This is what always made me chuckle a bit. I have a half dozen friends who were sysadmins 20 years ago and today they're "DevOps". Precisely zero have been put out of work.
  - throwawayapples 4y ago
    Yep. It's not like either sysadmin or devops are harder than or easier than the other... they're just different. Actually, seems like managing k8s is an order of time expenditure greater than managing an old-school F5 with a bunch of Unixy web servers behind it.
    - primax 4y ago
      When I was a sysadmin it was definitely harder. Devops gives the benefit of cows instead of pets, and a ton of reusable work. So I get why it's more 'valuable' from a remuneration basis.
      - throwawayapples 4y ago
        Pets aren't that bad if your pets are a few elephants.
        primax 4y ago
        Yeah but how often are they elephants, and how often are they cattle that have just been neglected for 15 years?
    - SoftTalker 4y ago
      Yes, time and complexity. Managing a switch and servers is a piece of cake compared to managing k8s, IMO.
      - aeyes 4y ago
        Depends on how much abstraction you have, I have seen big companies where deploying code is basically like using Heroku. As an engineer responsible for a couple of services you don't need to know or care if this code is running on bare metal, Mesos, K8s and you care even less about the data center. I come from this old world of managing switches and servers and today we definitely need a lot less people to run code in production. I used to work at a company with ~2000 machines in physical data centers before containerization, this required a huge infra team - I'm sure that today I could support the same workloads with half the team.
    - zikduruqe 4y ago
      >seems like managing k8s is an order of time expenditure greater than managing an old-school F5... or Nagios...

baq 4y ago

if you're buying either, you're paying millions in salaries to technicians and sysadmins and DBAs^W^W^Wdevops and SREs. i've been on both sides of the fence and it's a case of 'grass is always greener on the other side'. the truth is, running any sort of non-trivial infra is ducking expensive.

bcrosby95 4y ago
This is what always made me chuckle a bit. I have a half dozen friends who were sysadmins 20 years ago and today they're "DevOps". Precisely zero have been put out of work.
- throwawayapples 4y ago
  Yep. It's not like either sysadmin or devops are harder than or easier than the other... they're just different. Actually, seems like managing k8s is an order of time expenditure greater than managing an old-school F5 with a bunch of Unixy web servers behind it.
  - primax 4y ago
    When I was a sysadmin it was definitely harder. Devops gives the benefit of cows instead of pets, and a ton of reusable work. So I get why it's more 'valuable' from a remuneration basis.
    - throwawayapples 4y ago
      Pets aren't that bad if your pets are a few elephants.
      - primax 4y ago
        Yeah but how often are they elephants, and how often are they cattle that have just been neglected for 15 years?
  - SoftTalker 4y ago
    Yes, time and complexity. Managing a switch and servers is a piece of cake compared to managing k8s, IMO.
    - aeyes 4y ago
      Depends on how much abstraction you have, I have seen big companies where deploying code is basically like using Heroku. As an engineer responsible for a couple of services you don't need to know or care if this code is running on bare metal, Mesos, K8s and you care even less about the data center. I come from this old world of managing switches and servers and today we definitely need a lot less people to run code in production. I used to work at a company with ~2000 machines in physical data centers before containerization, this required a huge infra team - I'm sure that today I could support the same workloads with half the team.
  - zikduruqe 4y ago
    >seems like managing k8s is an order of time expenditure greater than managing an old-school F5... or Nagios...