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this makes no sense: can individual companies operate computing infrastructure more efficiently than cloud providers? if not, then instead of migrating just ne

by asah 3y ago

this makes no sense: can individual companies operate computing infrastructure more efficiently than cloud providers? if not, then instead of migrating just negotiate.

p1necone 3y ago
I think the biggest thing is that the minimum extra spend if you want in house managed infra is basically the salary of a full time sysadmin + hardware costs. You can pay for a lot of cloud resources for that much, even when the cloud resources are massively overpriced compared to what you could manage if you had more scale. The only other alternative is finding someone who's good enough at it to make that full time sysadmin job just a small part of their "actual" job responsibilities, but that person is pretty hard to find.
- acdha 3y ago
  The other thing is remembering it’s not one full time sysadmin but many and also things like security staffing. One dude running some Linux boxes isn’t going to give you the kinds of audit logging, monitoring, encryption, etc. which is table stakes in the cloud world. You can hire those people, buy HSMs, etc. but then you’re talking a much bigger gap before you break even. Then you get a step function cost increase building and operating all of the services your developers aren’t getting out of the box.
- jodersky 3y ago
  > I think the biggest thing is that the minimum extra spend if you want in house managed infra is basically the salary of a full time sysadmin + hardware costs. The cloud promises to make admin tasks easier, however I have never seen it eliminate the role of a sysadmin in practice. In my experience, most organizations that run their infra on a cloud still have dedicated admin roles (often called "DevOps" or infra teams). Hence, I think that the claim that a sysadmin's salary is an extra expense for self-managed infrastructure is exaggerated. You may need more sysadmins for achieving the same features in a self-managed setup compared to the cloud, but it is not a linear scale.
tommek4077 3y ago
Good luck negotiating data transfer costs with AWS.
- dekhn 3y ago
  What do you mean? I did the AWS negotiation for a small but rapidly growing startup and that was one of the negotiables, there was no real problem getting discounts.
  - asah 3y ago
    +1 I've also negotiated transfer costs and in fact AWS has a semi-published discounting schedule for volume customers.
vb-8448 3y ago
Here we go, the biggest success of AWS is making people believe there's no alternative. - there are a lot of companies that nowadays operates their computing infrastructure. - there is a lot of space in the middle, you are not forced to choose just over full self-host and full-cloud, there is colocation, hosting, providers like hertzner, digital ocean and so on.
toast0 3y ago
Probably, yes? Operating it to their specific needs is likely to be more efficient than operating to the generalized needs of cloud customers. IMHO, the biggest wins for cloud are when you can't fill up a whole machine and when your needs vary significantly throughout the day and you can scale up and down quickly and not have to pay for unused capacity.
ExoticPearTree 3y ago
> this makes no sense: can individual companies operate computing infrastructure more efficiently than cloud providers? As long as you know your predicted growth yes. Cloud providers are operating "efficiently" because they do oversubscription on a lot of services. You don't really think that those 8 vCPUs are dedicated to your VM only, do you? Also, the thing with cloud are the managed services that make it easy for developers to process/exchange data, like Amazon SQS or cloud functions and things like this. Like the first comment says, if you know what you are doing, it is quite easy actually to host your infrastructure on-prem.

by asah 3y ago

this makes no sense: can individual companies operate computing infrastructure more efficiently than cloud providers? if not, then instead of migrating just negotiate.

p1necone 3y ago

I think the biggest thing is that the minimum extra spend if you want in house managed infra is basically the salary of a full time sysadmin + hardware costs. You can pay for a lot of cloud resources for that much, even when the cloud resources are massively overpriced compared to what you could manage if you had more scale. The only other alternative is finding someone who's good enough at it to make that full time sysadmin job just a small part of their "actual" job responsibilities, but that person is pretty hard to find.

acdha 3y ago
The other thing is remembering it’s not one full time sysadmin but many and also things like security staffing. One dude running some Linux boxes isn’t going to give you the kinds of audit logging, monitoring, encryption, etc. which is table stakes in the cloud world. You can hire those people, buy HSMs, etc. but then you’re talking a much bigger gap before you break even. Then you get a step function cost increase building and operating all of the services your developers aren’t getting out of the box.
jodersky 3y ago
> I think the biggest thing is that the minimum extra spend if you want in house managed infra is basically the salary of a full time sysadmin + hardware costs. The cloud promises to make admin tasks easier, however I have never seen it eliminate the role of a sysadmin in practice. In my experience, most organizations that run their infra on a cloud still have dedicated admin roles (often called "DevOps" or infra teams). Hence, I think that the claim that a sysadmin's salary is an extra expense for self-managed infrastructure is exaggerated. You may need more sysadmins for achieving the same features in a self-managed setup compared to the cloud, but it is not a linear scale.

tommek4077 3y ago

Good luck negotiating data transfer costs with AWS.

dekhn 3y ago
What do you mean? I did the AWS negotiation for a small but rapidly growing startup and that was one of the negotiables, there was no real problem getting discounts.
- asah 3y ago
  +1 I've also negotiated transfer costs and in fact AWS has a semi-published discounting schedule for volume customers.

vb-8448 3y ago

Here we go, the biggest success of AWS is making people believe there's no alternative. - there are a lot of companies that nowadays operates their computing infrastructure. - there is a lot of space in the middle, you are not forced to choose just over full self-host and full-cloud, there is colocation, hosting, providers like hertzner, digital ocean and so on.

toast0 3y ago

Probably, yes? Operating it to their specific needs is likely to be more efficient than operating to the generalized needs of cloud customers. IMHO, the biggest wins for cloud are when you can't fill up a whole machine and when your needs vary significantly throughout the day and you can scale up and down quickly and not have to pay for unused capacity.

ExoticPearTree 3y ago

> this makes no sense: can individual companies operate computing infrastructure more efficiently than cloud providers? As long as you know your predicted growth yes. Cloud providers are operating "efficiently" because they do oversubscription on a lot of services. You don't really think that those 8 vCPUs are dedicated to your VM only, do you? Also, the thing with cloud are the managed services that make it easy for developers to process/exchange data, like Amazon SQS or cloud functions and things like this. Like the first comment says, if you know what you are doing, it is quite easy actually to host your infrastructure on-prem.