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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.
by 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 agoThe 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.