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> This is not to say you won’t need personnel Ding ding ding, we have a winner! Paying premiums for BigCloud means not paying salaries, not worrying about an

> This is not to say you won’t need personnel Ding ding ding, we have a winner! Paying premiums for BigCloud means not paying salaries, not worrying about an outage that could happen while your seniors are on vacation, not needing to set up resilient internal processes and controls for datacenter management, not worrying about datacenter management compliance, etc. etc. Needing to hire datacenter personnel is a problem and it is a problem that BigCloud solved.

endisneigh 3y ago
You're thinking about it the wrong way. Sure you're not paying salaries, but now you're paying for experts who understand the cloud and you're paying more for those people compared to datacenter people. At Azure I was surprised how many data center people didn't even have a college degree and how little they were paid. Ultimately the only thing that matters is the total cost. To take true advantage of the cloud you need to use cloud specific technologies - serverless being the greatest example. Cloud VMs are neat and all, but in a sense it's the worst of both worlds. I'm not saying there isn't value in the cloud. I'm saying most people are overpaying. BigCloud didn't solve this any more than paying employees in general to solve your problems. With the era of free money coming to the end, many companies will come to this realization themselves in any case. BigTech clouds have 50%+ margins - something will give eventually. Any serious company is still going to have to pay oncallers, and admins with or without cloud. It's not like using the cloud absolves you from maintenance (pretty much every company with a valuation more than 100 million has an infrastructure team, and uses the cloud. So clearly the cloud doesn't mean you don't have to maintain your own infrastructure). And now we come back to my point - why isn't the fleet easier to maintain to begin with? I'm not even talking about bare-metal necessarily. Say you use VMs. Still a huge hassle.
- DANmode 3y ago
  > BigTech clouds have 50%+ margins - something will give eventually. Yes, the oligopoly, and the vendor lock-in. Certainly won't be expecting the "advantage" of being able to outsource your sysadmins to somewhere else at the drop of a hat to be the thing that gives.
  - verdverm 3y ago
    How often do people actually migrate clouds? Vendor lock in at this level is not really an issue for most, trying to be agnostic will create more problems and time sinks
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
jjav 3y ago
> Paying premiums for BigCloud means not paying salaries You need all the same people to manage the same software stack, regardless of whether the VMs sit on hardware you own or at an AWS rack. Nearly all the work is on the software side. The physical bit of maintaining the boxes is a minimal percentage of the work. At various startups we usually didn't have anyone hired to do this work because there wasn't enough to justify a person. Most simple changes (like pull and replace a hot-plug drive) can be done by the colo personnel and for larger work someone would drive to the colo maybe once a month. You only start to need dedicated hardware maintenance personnel at a very large scale. The premium you're paying for cpu and bandwidth at your BigCloud is so enormous that it'll easily pay many more salaries than the people you need even if you reach the scale of needing dedicated hardware people.
- icedchai 3y ago
  Yep, in the old days (almost 20 years ago now), I worked at a startup with its own racks. We'd go up there once a month to swap some drives. In my 5 years there, I had to use remote hands exactly twice to reboot a machine. A few other times, one of the servers froze but we were able to reboot it with ILO. This was 3 racks, about 30 machines spread between them (definitely a bunch of empty space, too.)
  - throwaway98158 3y ago
    Happy you, I was in the same situation but I was in the server room daily. Practically every day something went wrong.
    - icedchai 3y ago
      How many systems did you have? What sorts of problems?
    - jjav 3y ago
      Either you had thousands of machines (at which point is totally makes sense to hire a dedicated person with all the money you're saving) or the site had environmental problems (dirty power, bad cooling, etc?) causing the issues. Hardware is unbelievably reliable, systems normally run for many years without any attention.
icedchai 3y ago
You are right, but this was also solved by "dedicated server" folks years before cloud was a thing.

endisneigh 3y ago

You're thinking about it the wrong way. Sure you're not paying salaries, but now you're paying for experts who understand the cloud and you're paying more for those people compared to datacenter people. At Azure I was surprised how many data center people didn't even have a college degree and how little they were paid. Ultimately the only thing that matters is the total cost. To take true advantage of the cloud you need to use cloud specific technologies - serverless being the greatest example. Cloud VMs are neat and all, but in a sense it's the worst of both worlds. I'm not saying there isn't value in the cloud. I'm saying most people are overpaying. BigCloud didn't solve this any more than paying employees in general to solve your problems. With the era of free money coming to the end, many companies will come to this realization themselves in any case. BigTech clouds have 50%+ margins - something will give eventually. Any serious company is still going to have to pay oncallers, and admins with or without cloud. It's not like using the cloud absolves you from maintenance (pretty much every company with a valuation more than 100 million has an infrastructure team, and uses the cloud. So clearly the cloud doesn't mean you don't have to maintain your own infrastructure). And now we come back to my point - why isn't the fleet easier to maintain to begin with? I'm not even talking about bare-metal necessarily. Say you use VMs. Still a huge hassle.

DANmode 3y ago
> BigTech clouds have 50%+ margins - something will give eventually. Yes, the oligopoly, and the vendor lock-in. Certainly won't be expecting the "advantage" of being able to outsource your sysadmins to somewhere else at the drop of a hat to be the thing that gives.
- verdverm 3y ago
  How often do people actually migrate clouds? Vendor lock in at this level is not really an issue for most, trying to be agnostic will create more problems and time sinks
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

jjav 3y ago

> Paying premiums for BigCloud means not paying salaries You need all the same people to manage the same software stack, regardless of whether the VMs sit on hardware you own or at an AWS rack. Nearly all the work is on the software side. The physical bit of maintaining the boxes is a minimal percentage of the work. At various startups we usually didn't have anyone hired to do this work because there wasn't enough to justify a person. Most simple changes (like pull and replace a hot-plug drive) can be done by the colo personnel and for larger work someone would drive to the colo maybe once a month. You only start to need dedicated hardware maintenance personnel at a very large scale. The premium you're paying for cpu and bandwidth at your BigCloud is so enormous that it'll easily pay many more salaries than the people you need even if you reach the scale of needing dedicated hardware people.

icedchai 3y ago
Yep, in the old days (almost 20 years ago now), I worked at a startup with its own racks. We'd go up there once a month to swap some drives. In my 5 years there, I had to use remote hands exactly twice to reboot a machine. A few other times, one of the servers froze but we were able to reboot it with ILO. This was 3 racks, about 30 machines spread between them (definitely a bunch of empty space, too.)
- throwaway98158 3y ago
  Happy you, I was in the same situation but I was in the server room daily. Practically every day something went wrong.
  - icedchai 3y ago
    How many systems did you have? What sorts of problems?
  - jjav 3y ago
    Either you had thousands of machines (at which point is totally makes sense to hire a dedicated person with all the money you're saving) or the site had environmental problems (dirty power, bad cooling, etc?) causing the issues. Hardware is unbelievably reliable, systems normally run for many years without any attention.

icedchai 3y ago

You are right, but this was also solved by "dedicated server" folks years before cloud was a thing.