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IMO... infra teams need to realize that folks "othering" their infrastructure means the infra team isn't meeting their needs. Infra teams are now competing aga

IMO... infra teams need to realize that folks "othering" their infrastructure means the infra team isn't meeting their needs. Infra teams are now competing against DIY and PaaS solutions, especially all of the fly by night YC startups. Infra teams need to prove their worth or get out of the way and let the devs go buy a solution that replaces the infra team. The business cares about time to market, not the perfect little homegrown PaaS the infra team built. For the record, I'm an infrastructure person.

anotherhue 3y ago
100% this. If your company can run on a managed platform then it should. The reasons the whole world isn't already include: GDPR, SOC2 (audit, role level responsibilities), customer firewalls, encryption requirements (hello FIPS).
- echelon 3y ago
  Managed platforms are obscenely expensive. I know, I know - "time to market", "scaling on demand", "open source isn't free", "not our core competency", etc. Infra staffing, hardware, scaling, and upgrades are expensive. But it doesn't help the fact that cloud costs an arm and a leg too. I can't believe we haven't seen more of a race to the bottom in terms of costs and offerings. Amazon is gorging itself on your margin. I wish we lived in a world with 20 AWSes, all at the same scale and market penetration.
  - MobileVet 3y ago
    I don't agree. People are far more expensive than managed infrastructure and that is what the comparison should be... not against 'bare metal.' When you compare the managed infra costs to bare metal directly, you are comparing apples to oranges. We run an 8 figure business on mid 5 figure managed infra costs. An infrastructure team would be several multiples more expensive than that... even if it was a single individual. Just because you can do it yourself or more cheaply, doesn't mean the effective business costs are less. Edited: for grammar
    - tester756 3y ago
      >People are far more expensive than managed infrastructure and that is what the comparison should be... not against 'bare metal.' When you compare the managed infra costs to bare metal directly, you are comparing apples to oranges. Clearly, because "DevOps" people / skills are for free right? Good software engineers who additionally have exp with Cloud and all its craziness definitely aren't asking for way higher salaries? I've worked in small size data center and the amount of work performed by 2x minimal wage technicians was huge. They were running on 5-10 engineers + 3 more skilled ppl at day and 1 person on night shift with 1 or 2 being "wakeable"
  - anotherhue 3y ago
    Just to be clear, I never mentioned costs as a factor. Those are about margin, what I'm discussing is about core product. "Is a product made by grown ups familiar with your sector" is an actual selling point for most enterprise SaaS.
- MobileVet 3y ago
  100% part 2. Infrastructure has SO many potholes and edge cases. Tackling it directly by 'rolling your own' is optimistic naivety at best.
drewbug01 3y ago
> Infra teams need to prove their worth or get out of the way This is an incredibly demeaning comment. Assuming your colleagues have inherent worth and that they're doing their jobs reasonably given the constraints and demands placed upon them is a far more humane way to go about work. > The business cares about time to market, not the perfect little homegrown PaaS the infra team built. Those "perfect little homegrown PaaS" solutions get built for a reason - because of what happens after you get to market: the business starts to care a whole lot about how much it costs to run the thing you just shipped. One of the main reasons a "perfect little homegrown PaaS" gets built is because it's typically a lot cheaper to run in-house. Lots of downsides to it, for sure, but you can't neglect the immense cost of a PaaS when you're running a business.
- bheadmaster 3y ago
  > Assuming your colleagues have inherent worth That sounds cute, but humans don't have inherent worth in a business. If you don't contribute to success (and aren't good enough at deceiving people that you are), you're going to get laid off. I think that's what the parent comment is saying - infra is competing with potentially cheaper and more flexible solutions. Even if they do their jobs the best they can, put 100% effort in, yada yada yada - if there's a more efficient solution, infra as a whole will be left behind.
  - mighmi 3y ago
    > infra is competing with potentially cheaper For example? The managed or cloud or... solutions are normally magnitudes more expensive than in house. PaaS are the closest in cost, due to the admin savings etc. but even there, we know current prices are investor funded to gain share. At the far end, compare what you can get for $150/month at Hetzner vs. AWS. At real scale, paying for an infra team to run it will save a lot of money (and I've yet to see a fully managed solution which doesn't have a team of YAMLers anyway.)
    - 0xEFF 3y ago
      There are loads of startups offering platforms as a service for about half the cost per year of one devops engineer.
jayd16 3y ago
Very true. I realize infra teams have their own priorities but all too often I meet infra folks that would rather tell me my requirements are wrong than work with me towards a solution. If you're not getting better customization from the inhouse team then it's not hard to see a big paas is probably a better offering than what the infra team deems necessary.

anotherhue 3y ago

100% this. If your company can run on a managed platform then it should. The reasons the whole world isn't already include: GDPR, SOC2 (audit, role level responsibilities), customer firewalls, encryption requirements (hello FIPS).

echelon 3y ago
Managed platforms are obscenely expensive. I know, I know - "time to market", "scaling on demand", "open source isn't free", "not our core competency", etc. Infra staffing, hardware, scaling, and upgrades are expensive. But it doesn't help the fact that cloud costs an arm and a leg too. I can't believe we haven't seen more of a race to the bottom in terms of costs and offerings. Amazon is gorging itself on your margin. I wish we lived in a world with 20 AWSes, all at the same scale and market penetration.
- MobileVet 3y ago
  I don't agree. People are far more expensive than managed infrastructure and that is what the comparison should be... not against 'bare metal.' When you compare the managed infra costs to bare metal directly, you are comparing apples to oranges. We run an 8 figure business on mid 5 figure managed infra costs. An infrastructure team would be several multiples more expensive than that... even if it was a single individual. Just because you can do it yourself or more cheaply, doesn't mean the effective business costs are less. Edited: for grammar
  - tester756 3y ago
    >People are far more expensive than managed infrastructure and that is what the comparison should be... not against 'bare metal.' When you compare the managed infra costs to bare metal directly, you are comparing apples to oranges. Clearly, because "DevOps" people / skills are for free right? Good software engineers who additionally have exp with Cloud and all its craziness definitely aren't asking for way higher salaries? I've worked in small size data center and the amount of work performed by 2x minimal wage technicians was huge. They were running on 5-10 engineers + 3 more skilled ppl at day and 1 person on night shift with 1 or 2 being "wakeable"
- anotherhue 3y ago
  Just to be clear, I never mentioned costs as a factor. Those are about margin, what I'm discussing is about core product. "Is a product made by grown ups familiar with your sector" is an actual selling point for most enterprise SaaS.
MobileVet 3y ago
100% part 2. Infrastructure has SO many potholes and edge cases. Tackling it directly by 'rolling your own' is optimistic naivety at best.

drewbug01 3y ago

> Infra teams need to prove their worth or get out of the way This is an incredibly demeaning comment. Assuming your colleagues have inherent worth and that they're doing their jobs reasonably given the constraints and demands placed upon them is a far more humane way to go about work. > The business cares about time to market, not the perfect little homegrown PaaS the infra team built. Those "perfect little homegrown PaaS" solutions get built for a reason - because of what happens after you get to market: the business starts to care a whole lot about how much it costs to run the thing you just shipped. One of the main reasons a "perfect little homegrown PaaS" gets built is because it's typically a lot cheaper to run in-house. Lots of downsides to it, for sure, but you can't neglect the immense cost of a PaaS when you're running a business.

bheadmaster 3y ago
> Assuming your colleagues have inherent worth That sounds cute, but humans don't have inherent worth in a business. If you don't contribute to success (and aren't good enough at deceiving people that you are), you're going to get laid off. I think that's what the parent comment is saying - infra is competing with potentially cheaper and more flexible solutions. Even if they do their jobs the best they can, put 100% effort in, yada yada yada - if there's a more efficient solution, infra as a whole will be left behind.
- mighmi 3y ago
  > infra is competing with potentially cheaper For example? The managed or cloud or... solutions are normally magnitudes more expensive than in house. PaaS are the closest in cost, due to the admin savings etc. but even there, we know current prices are investor funded to gain share. At the far end, compare what you can get for $150/month at Hetzner vs. AWS. At real scale, paying for an infra team to run it will save a lot of money (and I've yet to see a fully managed solution which doesn't have a team of YAMLers anyway.)
  - 0xEFF 3y ago
    There are loads of startups offering platforms as a service for about half the cost per year of one devops engineer.

jayd16 3y ago

Very true. I realize infra teams have their own priorities but all too often I meet infra folks that would rather tell me my requirements are wrong than work with me towards a solution. If you're not getting better customization from the inhouse team then it's not hard to see a big paas is probably a better offering than what the infra team deems necessary.