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The conclusion completely handwaves the massive overheads that come with not only owning your own infrastructure, but also having to manage a complex platform s

The conclusion completely handwaves the massive overheads that come with not only owning your own infrastructure, but also having to manage a complex platform stack and its security. The security points, which the main points hinges on, seem hyperfocused and in most cases misguided. Redshift is not internet facing. If your Redshift is internet facing, you've messed up somewhere. The CPU attack example given is for AMD ZEN, which the most common AWS workload CPUs aren't. Further, the benefit of using a cloud provider is that they put mitigations in place for most exploits, whereas running your own stack means it's now on you; running your own stack does not excuse you from having to put mitigations in place. In the examples again, the speed to market's problems are a reflection of your organisation, not the cloud. Stepping back a little, I'm thinking (as terrible as it is) that this is a case of blaming the tools, but never yourself; a lot of the problems the author is seeing seem very specific to their observations but are a poor use and poor understanding of AWS in general. Overall not a great article, with a headline designed for people who already dislike AWS/GCP/Azure.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
pas 3y ago
not to mention that the obvious/incremental move is not to completely exclusive DC, but to simply cheaper providers with managed VMs, then dedicated (but still managed) HW, and there's a long tail of that before breaking ground for a new DC makes any sense. somewhere along there's Oxide's "cloud in a rack" thing.
Volume999 3y ago
I agree on the security part, and what about the cost argument? I think I've seen a few companies switching over to data centers due to the costs they can save money on moving from the clouds, and I also think mature orgs prefer cap ex and depreciation to op ex (although I am not far from clueless on this point)?
tmpX7dMeXU 3y ago
Genuinely feels like there’s a constant trickle of arguments from people looking to do all they can to shift the tides such that their skill set is more in demand. Or maybe it’s just an ideological obsession. I don’t know. I feel the same way whenever the “use C for everything” people catch a whiff of performance mattering and very strongly suggest that the only way to dig ourselves out of this mess is to move back to the One True Language.
- stavros 3y ago
  In my experience The Cloud™ requires a much larger skillset, ensuring that your ops department will never stop growing.
  - acqq 3y ago
    I have an impression that is "avoided" in many companies by demanding from the newly hired programmers to have "cloud experience". My problem is that that usually ends up being "programmers have taken courses about the way cloud vendor Y does the job" which then actually means "the programmers had drunk the propaganda of the cloud vendor Y" which is not a directly reusable knowledge for anything than "here's how we adjust our work to be charged by the cloud vendor Y". Which I think is guaranteed to have a company which can't even imagine doing it any other way.
  - duggan 3y ago
    It also depend on what requirements your business has and who you have available. The skillets are different and they overlap in places, but one way or the other if your business is growing your operations requirements will grow. I am hugely in favour of AWS for web startups I am involved with because 1) I know AWS very well, 2) they provide hundreds of thousands of euros/dollars of credit to startups (I think all the big cloud vendors do at this stage), 3) it's useful to have architectural flexibility, and 4) they can take on a bunch of the security and availability burden that can otherwise be very labour intensive in a small company. Also you can pry S3 and RDS Aurora out of my cold dead hands!
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
antonvs 3y ago
In general when people mention "cost" as an issue for cloud, they're narrowly comparing what a CPU core or GB of RAM or disk costs on paper between cloud and datacenter/onprem. This completely misses the business case for cloud, and is why these sorts of analyses don't convince that many business folk, and why cloud use continues to grow fast. The business case is that someone else is doing the infrastructure management for you, at commodity prices, but you still have complete, direct control over "your" resources and ability to easily automate everything. This tends to save much more money than any % of your CPU, memory, and disk budget could possibly achieve. It's sort of like saying, instead of taking cars from your corporate fleet to a repair shop when they break, repair them yourself! Just hire some mechanics, build or rent a garage and equipment, and voila! And also, why are you buying electricity from the electric company anyway? Just build a generator next to your office building! Maybe make it nuclear just like some of the big electric companies! For many companies, the "just host it in a datacenter" argument is no less silly than these scenarios.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- rhaway84773 3y ago
  The real business case for the cloud is it replaces capex with opex. Which is great if you have limited capital (bootstrapping, new startup, etc), or are the CEO of a large company that wants to show better cash flow to earn a larger bonus. In reality, the idea that the cloud somehow means you can outsource your infrastructure team rarely works out in practice. At best you’ll get much more expensive developers having to spend time on infrastructure which might look like a couple of fewer salaries to pay, but you’re likely now paying for it through dev time anyways.
  - datavirtue 3y ago
    The REAL business case is cargo culting.
- ericyan 3y ago
  > The business case is that someone else is doing the infrastructure management for you. Many business people believe that moving to cloud can reduce the headcount needed for managing the infra, but that is usually not what's happening. You will still need more or less the same amount of people to patch the OS and configure the networking, but with a slightly different skill set -- instead of Cisco IOS commands, they now need to deal with AWS transit gateway. Every data center I worked with offers on-site remote hands that will rack new servers or replace hard drives or PSUs for you. There are also third-party companies that offers this service. Redundant power and air conditioning are the responsibility of the colocation provider and those are covered by the SLA. Those data centres do have generators on-site. That said, configuring you top-of-rack switch is usually not covered by the co-location contract. This need to be done by a network engineer, usually the same person that would manage VPCs.
di4na 3y ago
The other thing they keep missing. Where are the people with the skills to do this work? I wrote a whole post about it, but it is not like people with that knowledge exist in troves just waiting to be hired. There are no path to learn this stuff either. Do we really expect every single company out there to build teams of sysadmin and operators from a non existing pool of talents? It is easy to say that people can move to onprem, but orgs can barely hire the talents they need already. Sure let put even more pressure on a limited supply.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- otabdeveloper4 3y ago
  AWS and Azure is a much more niche skill set. E.g., there's probably three orders of magnitude more engineers familiar with Postgres out there in the world than with DynamoDB.
  - di4na 3y ago
    To the point of running it smoothly at scale in prod with backup? Nope. Hence you learn the RDS api and use it.
PartiallyTyped 3y ago
It handwaves all the things EC2 and all services built on top do. The amount of engineering needed just to migrate droplets live is enormous - it’s an art (according to a friend in hypervisors), and that ignores everything else regarding hypervisors and security. Scalability is also a thing you get “for free” with serverless computing.
rakkhi 3y ago
Thanks all for your engagement and comments. I have updated the article to address many of these points.
jsiepkes 3y ago
> The conclusion completely handwaves the massive overheads that come with not only owning your own infrastructure Even if you feel that is a serious obstacle (which I personally don't) you can buy a managed solution (such as an Oxide rack) and use that on prem.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

pas 3y ago

not to mention that the obvious/incremental move is not to completely exclusive DC, but to simply cheaper providers with managed VMs, then dedicated (but still managed) HW, and there's a long tail of that before breaking ground for a new DC makes any sense. somewhere along there's Oxide's "cloud in a rack" thing.

Volume999 3y ago

I agree on the security part, and what about the cost argument? I think I've seen a few companies switching over to data centers due to the costs they can save money on moving from the clouds, and I also think mature orgs prefer cap ex and depreciation to op ex (although I am not far from clueless on this point)?

tmpX7dMeXU 3y ago

Genuinely feels like there’s a constant trickle of arguments from people looking to do all they can to shift the tides such that their skill set is more in demand. Or maybe it’s just an ideological obsession. I don’t know. I feel the same way whenever the “use C for everything” people catch a whiff of performance mattering and very strongly suggest that the only way to dig ourselves out of this mess is to move back to the One True Language.

stavros 3y ago
In my experience The Cloud™ requires a much larger skillset, ensuring that your ops department will never stop growing.
- acqq 3y ago
  I have an impression that is "avoided" in many companies by demanding from the newly hired programmers to have "cloud experience". My problem is that that usually ends up being "programmers have taken courses about the way cloud vendor Y does the job" which then actually means "the programmers had drunk the propaganda of the cloud vendor Y" which is not a directly reusable knowledge for anything than "here's how we adjust our work to be charged by the cloud vendor Y". Which I think is guaranteed to have a company which can't even imagine doing it any other way.
- duggan 3y ago
  It also depend on what requirements your business has and who you have available. The skillets are different and they overlap in places, but one way or the other if your business is growing your operations requirements will grow. I am hugely in favour of AWS for web startups I am involved with because 1) I know AWS very well, 2) they provide hundreds of thousands of euros/dollars of credit to startups (I think all the big cloud vendors do at this stage), 3) it's useful to have architectural flexibility, and 4) they can take on a bunch of the security and availability burden that can otherwise be very labour intensive in a small company. Also you can pry S3 and RDS Aurora out of my cold dead hands!
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

antonvs 3y ago

In general when people mention "cost" as an issue for cloud, they're narrowly comparing what a CPU core or GB of RAM or disk costs on paper between cloud and datacenter/onprem. This completely misses the business case for cloud, and is why these sorts of analyses don't convince that many business folk, and why cloud use continues to grow fast. The business case is that someone else is doing the infrastructure management for you, at commodity prices, but you still have complete, direct control over "your" resources and ability to easily automate everything. This tends to save much more money than any % of your CPU, memory, and disk budget could possibly achieve. It's sort of like saying, instead of taking cars from your corporate fleet to a repair shop when they break, repair them yourself! Just hire some mechanics, build or rent a garage and equipment, and voila! And also, why are you buying electricity from the electric company anyway? Just build a generator next to your office building! Maybe make it nuclear just like some of the big electric companies! For many companies, the "just host it in a datacenter" argument is no less silly than these scenarios.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
rhaway84773 3y ago
The real business case for the cloud is it replaces capex with opex. Which is great if you have limited capital (bootstrapping, new startup, etc), or are the CEO of a large company that wants to show better cash flow to earn a larger bonus. In reality, the idea that the cloud somehow means you can outsource your infrastructure team rarely works out in practice. At best you’ll get much more expensive developers having to spend time on infrastructure which might look like a couple of fewer salaries to pay, but you’re likely now paying for it through dev time anyways.
- datavirtue 3y ago
  The REAL business case is cargo culting.
ericyan 3y ago
> The business case is that someone else is doing the infrastructure management for you. Many business people believe that moving to cloud can reduce the headcount needed for managing the infra, but that is usually not what's happening. You will still need more or less the same amount of people to patch the OS and configure the networking, but with a slightly different skill set -- instead of Cisco IOS commands, they now need to deal with AWS transit gateway. Every data center I worked with offers on-site remote hands that will rack new servers or replace hard drives or PSUs for you. There are also third-party companies that offers this service. Redundant power and air conditioning are the responsibility of the colocation provider and those are covered by the SLA. Those data centres do have generators on-site. That said, configuring you top-of-rack switch is usually not covered by the co-location contract. This need to be done by a network engineer, usually the same person that would manage VPCs.

di4na 3y ago

The other thing they keep missing. Where are the people with the skills to do this work? I wrote a whole post about it, but it is not like people with that knowledge exist in troves just waiting to be hired. There are no path to learn this stuff either. Do we really expect every single company out there to build teams of sysadmin and operators from a non existing pool of talents? It is easy to say that people can move to onprem, but orgs can barely hire the talents they need already. Sure let put even more pressure on a limited supply.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
otabdeveloper4 3y ago
AWS and Azure is a much more niche skill set. E.g., there's probably three orders of magnitude more engineers familiar with Postgres out there in the world than with DynamoDB.
- di4na 3y ago
  To the point of running it smoothly at scale in prod with backup? Nope. Hence you learn the RDS api and use it.

PartiallyTyped 3y ago

It handwaves all the things EC2 and all services built on top do. The amount of engineering needed just to migrate droplets live is enormous - it’s an art (according to a friend in hypervisors), and that ignores everything else regarding hypervisors and security. Scalability is also a thing you get “for free” with serverless computing.

rakkhi 3y ago

Thanks all for your engagement and comments. I have updated the article to address many of these points.

jsiepkes 3y ago

> The conclusion completely handwaves the massive overheads that come with not only owning your own infrastructure Even if you feel that is a serious obstacle (which I personally don't) you can buy a managed solution (such as an Oxide rack) and use that on prem.